Achievement

Trainee Scott Blumenthal (CUNY) and colleagues used stable isotopes in feces of wild mountain gorillas to reconstruct the feeding behavior of four individuals within a single year. Stable isotopes are often used to understand the ecology of living and fossil animals and are particularly powerful for reconstructing short-term changes in diet. Isotope analyses of fossil teeth from early humans suggest that their diet included considerable seasonal variation. Living great apes provide a unique benchmark for understanding our ancestors and are known to have similarly variable diets; however, few isotopic data were available for direct comparison with the fossil record. The timing of diet shifts reconstructed with isotopes in the gorillas match the observed pattern, revealing that some aspects of dietary flexibility in apes can be measured with stable isotopes. The results support the hypothesis that early humans relied on diets at least as variable, and probably more so, than African apes.