Under the supervision of Robert Blumenschine, Co-Director of the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project (OLAPP), Kari Alyssa Prassack will investigate modern bird bone survivorship in various lake margin habitats in northern Tanzania, and then apply this taphonomic information to the rich fossil bird bone assemblages recovered by OLAPP from 1.75 million year old deposits at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The ultimate goal is to improve our understanding of the activities of early stone-tool-using hominins, whose archaeological remains commonly co-occur with fossil bird bone at Olduvai.
The use of modern environments for taphonomic and paleoecological studies ensures a higher level of confidence when reconstructing past environments and lifestyles of early hominins. Since a large saline lake dominated Olduvai's ancient landscapes, several modern saline/alkaline lake basin environments in the Rift Valley of Tanzania have been selected as field sites. Ms. Prassack will observe how bird bone survivorship varies across the landscape, which habitats are most likely to preserve bird bone, and how the landscape distribution of the living bird community is reflected in post-mortem bird bone deposition. Observations of carnivores feeding on birds will address the role of predation in bird bone survivorship, while bringing much needed data on feeding ecology of many smaller-bodied carnivores (e.g. serval, genet, ratel). Controlled observations in laboratory settings will determine how water and soils from different lake basin habitats alter the appearance of bird bone (e.g. staining, cracking, microbial activity), supplementing the field data. These data will be used to understand how various physical and ecological processes (e.g. sun, water and soil chemistry, predation risk) differentially affect the survivorship of modern bird bone across the landscape. Results will be integrated into existing OLAPP models of the environments in which ancient hominins at Olduvai lived in order to provide a greater understanding of their activities across the paleolandscape. Extensive taphonomic analysis of Olduvai's other fossil vertebrates has provided important information on hominin land use. This will be the first taphonomic analysis using the fossil birds at Olduvai.
The field methods being employed here combine established and novel methods in wildlife ethology, landscape ecology, and taphonomy, a direction that ensures interdisciplinary collaborations. Results of this study will have broad applicability beyond Olduvai, being relevant to numerous paleontological and archaeological localities, even those where fossil birds are highly fragmented and/or difficult to identify to higher taxonomic levels. As part of OLAPP's long term, ongoing research project in Tanzania, this project will further OLAPP's efforts to train Tanzanian nationals in field methods and data collection. As a doctoral dissertation project, the NSF award will assist in the graduate student training of Kari Prassack.
