Ancient DNA identification of domestic animals used for leather objects in Central Asia during the Bronze Age

Abstract

The arid climate of many regions within Central Asia often leads to excellent archaeological preservation, especially in sealed funerary contexts, allowing for ancient DNA analyses. While geneticists have looked at human remains, clothes, tools, and other burial objects are often neglected. In this paper, we present the results of an ancient DNA study on Bronze Age leather objects excavated from tombs of the Wupu cemetery in the Hami Oasis and Yanghai cemetery in the Turpan Oasis, both in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China. In addition to species identification of goat (Capra aegagrus/hircus), sheep (Ovis orientalis/aries), and cattle (Bos primigenius/taurus), mitochondrial haplogroups were determined for several samples. Our results show that Bronze Age domesticated goats and sheep from the Hami and Turpan oases possessed identical or closely related haplotypes to modern domestic animals of this area. The absence of leather produced from wild animals emphasizes the importance of animal husbandry in the cultures of Wupu and Yanghai.

Approaching sheep herds origins and the emergence of the wool economy in continental Europe during the Bronze Age

“…Demirci et al (Demirci et al 2013) can show the presence of both haplogroups A and B in sheep samples from the site Oylum Höyük in present-day Turkey dating from 1800 BCE. While further east Schröder et al (2016) demonstrated the presence of both haplogroups A and B in sheep leather clothing from the Wupu cemetery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of north-western China dating to Bronze Age (eighth-sixth century BCE). Haplogroup C has been found in modern Tsigai sheep in Hungary (Tapio et al 2006), but not yet in prehistoric samples from Europe.…”

Improving Species Identification of Ancient Mammals Based on Next-Generation Sequencing Data

“…DNA in very old samples is often severely fragmented and highly contaminated, and thus it is very difficult to successfully amplify for species identification—even for very short amplicons (e.g. <100 bp) [14,16,21,22]. In another study, 80 woolly mammoth samples were amplified using a species-specific primer pair with an amplicon size of 114 bp, and 19 samples could not be successfully sequenced.…”

“…Presently, the most frequently used methods for species identification are genetic-based PCR amplifications followed by sequencing and BLAST search (). These techniques have been continuously developed and widely used in various fields, including forensic science, paleontology, archaeology, wildlife research, and bird strike investigations [13,14,15,16,17]. DNA barcoding has become one of the most promising methods for species identification since Hebert et al [18] established the first barcoding system using a ~600 bp DNA fragment located in the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase I ( COI ).…”

“…The use of small amplicons plus multiple loci seems to be a more reasonable way to satisfy this tradeoff. Several studies have proved that this combination can successfully identify ancient birds [14], ancient fish [21], and other ancient animals [16,22]. However, although the amplicons used in these studies were smaller than 100 bp, the PCR amplification often failed to produce products necessary to identify the species of many ancient samples, which may have resulted from the highly degraded endogenous DNA.…”

High mitochondrial diversity of domesticated goats persisted among Bronze and Iron Age pastoralists in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor

“…HVR1 sequences contain high frequencies of polymorphisms that characterize particular haplogroups, while MT-CYB sequences are highly conserved and generally reflect inter-species variation, which we use here to differentiate between domesticated sheep and goat for ambiguously identified archaeological specimens, in addition to wild Capra species [56], which are likely present in the zooarchaeological assemblages of the sampled sites. Prior to a major study across the Near East [14], a very limited number of ancient mtDNA sequences have been analyzed, which only represent Neolithic Europe [57] and the Near East [58][59][60] and also Iron Age China [61,62].…”