Palaeoproteomics gives new insight into early southern African pastoralism
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The advent of domestication is a major step that transformed the subsistence strategies of past human societies. In Africa, domestic caprines (sheep and goat) were introduced in the north-eastern part of the continent from the Near East more than 9000 years ago. However, their diffusion southwards was slow. They are thought to have made their first appearance in the southern part of the continent ca. 2000 years ago, at a few Later Stone Age sites, including Leopard Cave (Erongo region, Namibia), which provided the oldest directly dated remains assigned to sheep or goat on the basis of morphology of bones and teeth. However, similarities in morphology, not only between these two domesticated caprine species, but also between them and the small wild antelopes, raised questions about the morphological species attribution of these remains. Additionally, the high fragmentation of the site’s osteological remains makes it difficult to achieve species-level taxonomic identification by comparative anatomy. In this paper, we report molecular species identification of the Leopard Cave remains using palaeoproteomics, a method that uses protein markers in bone and tooth collagen to achieve taxonomic identification of archaeological remains. We also report new direct radiocarbon dates. Wild antelope remains from museum collections were used to enrich the available protein record and propose de novo type I collagen sequences. Our results demonstrate that the remains morphologically described as domesticates actually belong to a wild antelope species and that domestic caprines first appeared at Leopard Cave 1500 years later than previously thought. This study illustrates that the use of palaeoproteomics coupled with direct radiocarbon dates is particularly suited to complement classic zooarchaeological studies, in this case concerning the arrival of the first herding practices in arid environments.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 14427 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 10 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISSN | 2045-2322 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
This work was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the LabEx ANR-10-LABX-0003-BCDiv, in the program ‘Investissement d’avenir’ ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02. Molecular experiments were performed thanks to an Action Thématique Muséum grant under projects ProtéArch (2016) and TopArch (2017) and the ‘Project Exploratoire Premier Soutien’ (PEPS) D2CAP from the CNRS. This work is part of LLM’s PhD thesis, supported by a grant from the DIM MAP of the Région Île-de-France (project ‘Introduction et diffusion du petit bétail en Afrique : approaches moléculaires’ [IBAAM]) and the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. The fieldwork was co-funded by the French ministry of foreign and European affairs (Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Développement international), the National Museum of Namibia and the National Heritage Council of Namibia. The authors are grateful to the Rust family, owners of Omandumba West Farm, Namibia, for their support; to the staff of the comparative anatomy collections of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris, France) for providing access to modern specimens of springbok and impala; and to F. Thil and N. Tisnerat-Laborde (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, Saclay, France) for graphitisation, accelerator mass spectrometry measurements and data reduction of the collagen samples. We are grateful to the Plateforme de Spectrométrie de Masse Bio-Organique, the Laboratoire de Datation par le Radiocarbone, and the Plateforme de Spectrométrie Infrarouge (especially X. Gallet) of the MNHN, and to the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement for access to the instruments. LLM, FD and DP are also grateful to PIL and TW for their help on early versions of this manuscript. The authors would like to thank S. Needs-Howarth for English editing of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
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