On the ecological connection between sabre-tooths and hominids: Faunal dispersal events in the Lower Pleistocene and a review of the evidence for the first human arrival in Europe

The chronology of the first colonization of Europe by hominids has been a rather controversial issue until this decade, with most palaeoanthropologists claiming that there was no significant habitation until Middle Pleistocene times. However, recent findings in Spain, Italy, Georgia and China, as well as the re-evaluation of the evidence from Java and Israel, indicate an earlier arrival of Homo in Eurasia, during the Lower Pleistocene. The systematic revision of European assemblages of large mammals has shown a faunal break at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary, marked by the arrival of African and Asian species, which allows the tracing of the ecological and biogeographical scenario in which the first dispersal of hominids out of Africa took place. African immigrants include among others two carnivore species, the giant hyaena Pachycrocuta brevirostris and the sabre-tooth Megantereon whitei. Sabre-tooth cats were extinct in East Africa by 1.5 Ma, which coincides with the emergence of the Acheulean Industrial Complex, but inhabited Eurasia until 0.5 Ma. Given that M. whitei was a hypercarnivorous predator that presumably left, on the carcasses of the ungulates hunted, large amounts of flesh and bone nutrients within, its arrival in Eurasia opened broad opportunities for scavenging by hominids and helps to explain the success of the Oldowan tools until 0.5 Ma.