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35 - The Paleoenvironment of the Plio-Pleistocene Chiwondo Beds of Northern Malawi

from Part III - Eastern and Central Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2022

Sally C. Reynolds
Affiliation:
Bournemouth University
René Bobe
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

The Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary deposits in Northern Malawi were first described as Chiwondo and Chitimwe Beds by Dixey (1927). In the 1920s and 1930s Dixey collected vertebrate remains mostly from localities close to “Uraha Hill” and attributed the deposits based on the interpretation of the fossils to the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Further studies have been undertaken by Clark and colleagues (1966, 1970), Coryndon (1966), Clark and Haynes (1970), Mawby (1970), Kaufulu and colleagues (1981), and by the Hominid Corridor Research Project (HCRP) since 1983 (e.g., Bromage et al., 1985, 1995). More than 1200 vertebrate fossils were collected by the HCRP from around 150 localities between Karonga in the north and Uraha in the south (Figure 35.1). The significance of the assemblage lies in its geographic position between the classical eastern and southern African hominid sites (Bromage et al., 1995; Kullmer et al., 1999a; Sandrock et al., 2007; Kullmer, 2008). The first evidence of a fossil hominin in Malawi, a fragmentary Homo rudolfensis mandible (HCRP-UR 501) from the Chiwondo Beds, was recovered from the southern locality U18 at Uraha in 1991 (Schrenk et al., 1993). The second hominin, a maxillary fragment of a Paranthropus boisei (HCRP-RC 911), was excavated at the northern locality RC 11 in Malema (Kullmer et al., 1999b); and the third hominin specimen, a Homo rudolfensis lower molar fragment (HCRP-MR 1106), was found at locality MR 10 in Mwenirondo just north of Malema in 2009 (Kullmer et al., 2011).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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