Also known as Tour la Reine
Where: Attiki, Greece (38.0° N, 23.7° E: paleocoordinates 37.7° N, 23.4° E)
When: Red Conglomeratic Member (Pikermi Formation), Late/Upper Miocene (11.6 - 5.3 Ma)
• The type mandible of Graecopithecus freybergi was found in Pyrgos Vassilissis at the top of the Red Conglomeratic Member.
Environment/lithology: fluvial; paleosol/pedogenic, red siltstone and red, yellow siltstone
• The Tortonian-Messinian transition in the Mediterranean appears to represent a period of significant environmental and climatic changes. During the latest Tortonian (~7.4–7.25 Ma) C4 grass ecosystems progressively penetrate the Balkan Peninsula and constitute the environment of the mammal fauna of Pikermi, which contradicts earlier assumptions . The classical Pikermi fauna is terminated at the beginning of the Messinian (7.25–7.10 Ma) by a significant faunal turnover (post-Pikermi turnover), accompanied by massive increase of Saharan dust and salt accumulation with profound effects on soil salinity and nutrition.
• Our results reveal formerly unrecognized Mediterranean environmental changes during the Tortonian-Messinian transition, which provide important constraints for the evolution of Graecopithecus freybergi. At the Tortonian-Messinian boundary (7.25 Ma), water-stress levels increased and wildfire frequency decreased, which can be interpreted as increasing aridification. Rather than representing a local phenomenon, aridification occurred on a larger scale. We demonstrate that aeolian dust accumulation was widespread at the northern Mediterranean coast and that large amount of salt-laden mineral dust and marine-based aerosols were blown from dried lake beds in North Africa toward Europe, where ~30-m-thick red silts were deposited in southern Greece and southern France. We relate this dust accumulation to progressive late Tortonian Mediterranean aridification and cooling, which started at around 7.4 Ma and culminated during the earliest Messinian, when Mediterranean Sea surface temperature dropped by about 7˚C to values comparable to the present-day (Fig 4). Modelling studies have shown that Middle Miocene Tethyan seaway closure and accelerated Late Miocene uplift of the Iranian plateau provided key boundary conditions for north African aridity. We hypothesize that the ~700 kyr cooling episode, combined with the long-term eccentricity minimum between 7.3 and 7.2 Ma, acted as a final trigger for substantial north African aridization, which resulted in the initial formation of a large Saharan and Arabian desert belt. Furthermore, mineral dust in Attica was rich in soluble evaporites (halite, gypsum) in the earliest Messinian and especially during two pronounced insolation seasonality minima at 7.18 and 7.157 Ma, which suggests an orbitally driven progressive Sahara desertification. We suppose that a latest Tortonian to early Messinian dust- and salt-laden atmosphere over the Mediterranean may have further accelerated cooling and aridification via absorption of incoming solar radiation and, thus, may partially explain regionally accentuated Mediterranean cooling.
• The documented environmental changes were likely to have caused a significant faunal transition. Our dating ofGraecopithecus and the taxonomy of its accompanying large mammals indicate that, during culmination of cooling at the base of the Messinian, the post-Pikermi turnover replaced part of the Pikermi fauna. Several newcomers like the elephantoid Anancus or the boselaphidTragoportax macedoniensis have Asian affinities and we hypothesize that Eastern Mediterranean aridification played an important role in the westward shift of their habitats.Graecopithecus, as part of this new post-Pikermi fauna, lived in a warm-temperate and dusty environment unlike any other known hominid (except for our own genus).
Size class: macrofossils
Collected by Freyberg, Paraskevaidis; reposited in the AMPG
• The Pyrgos Vassilissis vertebrate fossils are deposited in the Naturhistorische Gesellschaft Nu ¨rnberg (v. Freyberg collection numbers TE 101–133) and the Palaeontological Museum University of Athens (Paraskevaidis collection, prefix AMPG). No permits for geologic fieldwork in Azmaka (Bulgaria) and Pikermi (Greece) were required for the described study.
Primary reference: M. Böhme, N. Spassov, M. Ebner, D. Geraads, L. Hristova, U. Kirscher, S. Kötter, U. Linnemann, J. Prieto, S. Roussiakis, G. Theodorou, G. Uhlig, and M. Winklhofer. 2017. Messinian age and savannah environment of the possible hominin Graecopithecus from Europe . In R. Macchiarelli (ed.), PLoS One 12(5) [E. Vlachos/P. Kampouridis/P. Wagner]more details
Purpose of describing collection: paleoecologic analysis
PaleoDB collection 195555: authorized by Evangelos Vlachos, entered by Panagiotis Kampouridis on 13.08.2018
Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)
Taxonomic list
Mammalia | |
Proboscidea indet. proboscidean | |
Adcrocuta eximia Roth and Wagner 1854 hyaena | |
Bovidae sp., Gazella sp., "Tragoportax macedoniensis" = Miotragocerus macedoniensis, cf. Tragoportax amalthea
Gazella sp. Blaineville 1816 gazelle
"Tragoportax macedoniensis" = Miotragocerus macedoniensis Bouvrain 1988 antelope
cf. Tragoportax amalthea Roth and Wagner 1854 antelope | |
Bohlinia attica Lydekker 1886 giraffe | |
? Ceratotherium neumayri Osborn 1900 white rhino | |
Hippotherium brachypus hipparionine horse | |
Graecopithecus freybergi von Koenigswald 1972 ape |