Ancestors of Broom's pigs

Abstract

Between 1925 and 1950, Robert Broom described one new genus and four new species of extinct suids from Plio-Pleistocene sediments in South Africa – three of them of giant proportions and one the same size as the extant Wart Hog (Phacochoerus). Since the end of the Second World War, dozens of papers have been published on Plio-Pleistocene African suids, yet only one of the genera has had a detailed scenario of its origins published: Broom's genus Notochoerus, which is widely admitted to belong to the Tetraconodontinae and to be a descendant of Nyanzachoerus. The aim of this paper is to examine the well documented Late Miocene and Pliocene suid fossil record of Eurasia in order to determine whether any of the taxa could be closely related to the other African taxa described by Broom. A new species of suid from Egypt is described, which probably represents the earliest African record of the lineage that eventually gave rise to the kolpochoeres.

Keywords:

• Suidae
• Plio-Pleistocene
• Evolution
• Biochronology
• Africa
• Eurasia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the Royal Society of South Africa (Jane Carruthers, Francis Thackeray) for the invitation to participate in the Robert Broom Memorial Colloquium, Maropeng. Thanks also to the Ditsong Museum Palaeontology and Archaeozoology Departments, Pretoria, for allowing me to study fossils and extant mammal specimens in their care (Stephanie Potze, Lazarus Kgasi, Shaw Badenhorst) and to the Bernard Price Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand for access to fossils (Bernard Zipfel). Particular thanks go to Greg Davies for organising a visit to the Ditsong Museum, and to Tersia Perregil for locating bibliographic material. Thanks also to the Natural History Museum, London (Andy Currant, Jessica MacDonald). Funding was provided by the Ditsong Museum, the CNRS, the Collège de France and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. Thanks to Jane Dugard for logistic support, accommodation and discussions.