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Science 10 November 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5801, pp. 980 - 982
DOI: 10.1126/science.1133827
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Reports

Isotopic Evidence for Dietary Variability in the Early Hominin Paranthropus robustus

Matt Sponheimer,1 Benjamin H. Passey,2 Darryl J. de Ruiter,3 Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg,4 Thure E. Cerling,2,5 Julia A. Lee-Thorp6

Traditional methods of dietary reconstruction do not allow the investigation of dietary variability within the lifetimes of individual hominins. However, laser ablation stable isotope analysis reveals that the {delta}13C values of Paranthropus robustus individuals often changed seasonally and interannually. These data suggest that Paranthropus was not a dietary specialist and that by about 1.8 million years ago, savanna-based foods such as grasses or sedges or animals eating these foods made up an important but highly variable part of its diet.

1 Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
2 Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA.
3 Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
4 Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
5 Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA.
6 Department of Archeological Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford BD1 7DP, UK.

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