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What are the best modern analogs for ancient South American mammal communities? Evidence from ecological diversity analysis (EDA)

2020; Linguagem: Inglês

10.26879/962

1935-3952

Angeline M. Catena, Darin A. Croft,

Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

Ecological diversity analysis (EDA) is a technique that uses ecological attributes of mammals to reconstruct the community structure and habitat of a fossil locality.EDAs of South American paleofaunas have generally relied on modern comparative datasets from that continent, but modern faunas from other continents may be more appropriate models considering the high-level taxonomic differences that exist between modern and fossil South American mammal communities.To test this hypothesis, we selected five, well-sampled fossil localities for which independent paleoenvironmental data (e.g., paleosols, ichnofossils) have been published: four from South America (La Venta, Colombia; Quebrada Honda, Bolivia; Santa Cruz, Argentina; Tinguiririca, Chile) and one from Europe (Rümikon, Switzerland).We coded the extinct species from these sites, as well as ca.2,450 modern mammal species, for three ecological attributes: diet (eight categories), locomotor habit (six categories), and body mass (six categories).Percentages of species in each attribute category were used to compare the five paleofaunas to 179 modern faunas from six continents using correspondence analysis, hierarchical clustering, similarity percentage, and classification trees.The four South American paleofaunas were found to be most similar to Afrotropical, Indo-Malayan, and Palearctic modern faunas and, similarly, the European paleofauna most resembled faunas from a biome not currently present in the Palearctic.Our study highlights important differences in community structure between ancient and modern South American mammal faunas and suggests that modern mammalian communities from other continents are better analogues for ancient South American communities than modern South American faunas.