Synopsis of the biochronology of African Neogene and Quaternary Suiformes

Abstract

This festschrift in honour of H.B.S. Cooke provides an opportunity to prepare a synopsis of the biochronology of African Suiformes, a group with which he worked for many years. Cooke realised early in his career that the extreme variation that he noticed among African Plio-Pleistocene suid dentitions was the result of rapid evolution. In early years he reasoned that the fossils could be used to correlate fossil sites with one another in a relative way. Later in his career, with the emergence of geophysical dating, he was able to convert his biostratigraphic scale to a biochronological one, and from then on could propose ages in millions of years for deposits yielding suids. Cooke seldom worked on fossils older than 7 Ma, partly because the fossil record was poor, but also because what had been found was rather monotonous from a morphometric aspect. This paper provides the known chronological ranges of all the Neogene and Quaternary suiform species of Africa in order to extend Cooke's pioneering biostratigraphic framework downwards to the base of the Neogene, taking into account recently described species of suines and hippopotamids. A brief discussion of the palaeoenvironmental changes that probably led to many of the rapid dental evolution completes the paper.