Figure 1.
Geographic locations of Ishango and other African localities of early hominins fossils from the Plio-Pleistocene transition period, ca. 2.6–1.8 Ma (i.e. Au. africanus, Au. garhi, Au. sediba, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, P. aethiopicus, P. boisei, P. robustus).
Outlined in bold are the western and eastern branches of the African Rift. 1: Taung (South Africa); 2: Drimolen, Gladysvale, Gondolin, Kromdraai, Sterkfontein & Swartkrans (South Africa); 3: Malapa (South Africa); 4: Malema, Uraha (Malawi); 5: Olduvai (Tanzania); 6: Chemeron (Kenya); 7: West and East Turkana, Koobi Fora (Kenya); 8: Omo (Ethiopia); 9: Bouri, Hadar (Ethiopia).
Figure 2.
Stratigraphic section of Ishango 11 at the junction of de Heinzelin’s trenches (modified from [31]). See Text S1.2 and Figure S2 (in File S1) for the detailed description of the lithology.
ZPEm = Post-Emersion Zone; N.TUF = Tuffaceous Levels; SD-SFM = Hardened Sand - Fine Micaceous Sand, NFPr = Principal Fossiliferous Level, G.INF = Inferior Gravels, Lusso = Lusso Beds, R = Recent, TP = Museya Gravels Formations, TT = Ishango Gravels Formation, L = Lusso Formation.
Figure 3.
Average Raman spectra of three teeth from the NFPr layer, and of #Ish25.
Figure 4.
Photograph and three-dimensional reconstruction of Ishango left upper first molar (#Ish25).
Upper part, from top to bottom: buccal, mesial, occlusal, lateral and lingual views. Scale bar = 1 cm. Lower part, three-dimensional model of the outer enamel surface (left) and the enamel-dentine junction (right).
Figure 5.
Results of the principal component analysis of first molar EDJ shape in both shape (A) and form (B) space.
Projection of the first three principal components of the PCA of the enamel-dentine junction (EDJ) morphology. Solid lines in each convex hull represent static allometric trajectories for respective groups. Abbreviations: Sangiran specimens (S4, S7), Qafzeh specimens (Q9, Q10, Q15) and Steinheim (St).