Modern Lessons from Ancient Food Webs

By Justin D. Yeakel, Jennifer A. Dunne

From the Cambrian Burgess Shale to ancient Egypt, food webs share surprising structural attributes. When redundancy is lost, the threat of extinction grows.

Biology

This Article From Issue

May-June 2015

Volume 103, Number 3

Page 188

DOI: 10.1511/2015.114.188

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About 10,000 years ago, one could have mistaken the Egyptian landscape for that of East Africa today. Instead of vast arid deserts, the region north of Aswan held enough annual precipitation to support large herbivores that are strongly tied to standing bodies of water, including zebra, elephant, and rhinoceros. Lions, wild dogs, giraffes, and wildebeest filled out the savanna-woodland landscape, while the earliest pyramids were still thousands of years in the future.

Depictions of animals, such as this hunting scene from one side of King Tutankhamun’s Painted Box, built more than 3,000 years ago, document the mammal community of ancient Egypt over time. Piecing together ancient food webs can help us understand their fundamental properties.

Griffith Institute/University of Oxford

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