The trophic context of hominoid occurrence in the later Miocene of western Eurasia: a primate-free view

TL;DRAbstract

The term ‘hominoid locality’ is common enough in the informal jargon of students of fossil mammals, and is frequently used in a sense that somehow implies more than just ‘a locality from which hominoid material has been recovered’. It is a natural and intuitively attractive expectation that hominoid primates would occur in characteristic habitats and taxonomic settings. One might, for example, expect to find hominoids at localities that have produced large numbers (individuals or species) of other frugivorous, omnivorous or arboreal mammals. The impulse for the present study arose out of a wish to investigate whether, in fact, the pattern of hominoid occurrence differs from that of non-hominoid mammals in some easily demonstrable way. The trivial answer to this trivial question appears to be ‘no’, but as it turns out this ‘no’ hides a remarkably strong pattern that can be related both to the occurrence and the disappearance of hominoid primates from western Eurasia.

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