A study of carnivore competition in riparian and open habitats of modern savannas and its implications for hominid behavioral modelling.

Some of the models proposed to explain Plio-Pleistocene hominid behavior and the formation of early East African archaeological sites are based on the assumption that the riparian habitats in which most of them occur were places of low interspecific competition. Competition is expressed here in terms of carnivore and hominid interactions. In this paper, a study of carnivore interaction in open and closed habitats is presented. The results indicate that riparian woodland shows the lowest degree of competition in savanna ecosystems. This suggests that if Plio-Pleistocene carnivores were adapted like their modern counterparts, the paleoecological settings of early sites could have provided hominids with enough safety to process carcasses and behave as shown in "central-place", "near-kill location" and "refuge" foraging models. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.