Author, as appears in the article.: Rodriguez-Gomez, G; Palmqvist, P; Martinez-Navarro, B; Martin-Gonzalez, JA; Bermudez De Castro, JM
Department: Història i Història de l'Art
URV's Author/s: Martínez Navarro, Bienvenido
Keywords: Weibull model Venta-micena orce Trophic resource availability Sima del elefante Predator-prey relationships Paleoecosystems On-crop biomass Middle pleistocene Megantereon-whitei broom Macromammals Guadix-baza basin Gran dolina Fuente nueva-3 orce European early pleistocene Carrying capacity Body mass
Abstract: Estimates of adult body mass are usually considered as equivalent of mean population body size in most studies of ancient mammals. However, given that any population is composed in part of subadult individuals, this approach overestimates the mean population body mass and biomass. For this reason, more realistic estimates of mean population body mass should be used. In this paper, we: 1) test five different proxies of population mean mass; and 2) estimate the total prey biomass in the paleoecosystems from the Orce and Atapuerca sites as an approach for estimating their carrying capacity. Our results for past ecosystems support the use of survival profiles derived from the Weibull model (SPW), as they show values in better agreement with those of extant populations. They also estimate higher carrying capacities for the faunal assemblages of Orce than for those of Atapuerca. We suggest that the environmental conditions of Orce could have played an important role in the first peopling of Europe.
Thematic Areas: Paleontology Geociências Ciências biológicas i Biodiversidade
licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Author's mail: bienvenido.martinez@urv.cat
Record's date: 2024-09-07
Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Licence document URL: https://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
Papper original source: Comptes Rendus Palevol. 21 (10): 207-233
APA: Rodriguez-Gomez, G; Palmqvist, P; Martinez-Navarro, B; Martin-Gonzalez, JA; Bermudez De Castro, JM (2022). Mean body size estimation in large mammals and the computation of biomass in past ecosystems: An application to the Pleistocene sites of Orce and Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain). Comptes Rendus Palevol, 21(10), 207-233. DOI: 10.5852/cr-palevol2022v21a10
Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Journal publication year: 2022
Publication Type: Journal Publications
Repositori URV