Biology subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Gotfredsen, A. B..
Withdrawal StatementThe authors have withdrawn this manuscript as we carry out reanalysis and reinterpretation of our results. Therefore, the authors do not wish this work to be cited as reference for the project. If you have any questions, please contact the corresponding author.
The success and failure of past cultures across the Arctic was tightly coupled to the ability of past people to exploit the full range of resources available to them, and to adapt to fluctuations in resource availability. There is substantial evidence for the hunting of birds, caribou and a wide range of marine mammals in pre-historic Greenland from bone remains preserved in ancient middens. However, the extent to which these communities relied on marine resources such as fish and large cetaceans is understudied because of the taphonomic processes and bias that affect how these taxa present themselves in the archaeological record. To address this, we analyse DNA from bulk bone samples from 12 archaeological sites across Greenland dating from Paleo-Inuit to Neo-Inuit periods. Using a combination of metabarcoding and shotgun metagenomics we identify an assemblage of 43 species consisting of birds, fish, and both marine and terrestrial mammals. We find genetic evidence of five different whale species, of which the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) was the most commonly detected. Furthermore, we detect nine fish species, of which four have not previously been identified in any of the studied sites. Lastly, we identify a novel haplotype in caribou (Rangifer tarandus) at the 3,000-year-old site Itinnera, suggesting the presence of a distinct lineage of (now extinct) dwarfed caribou that colonised Greenland after the last ice age 9,000 years ago. Collectively, these findings provide a rare insight into whaling and fishing practices in Greenland and demonstrate that prehistoric Greenlandic communities had the social and technological capacity to target the largest whales available in the waters around them.
Determining the male and female representation in zooarchaeological material from hunted animal species is essential, to fully investigate the effects and means of prehistoric hunting practices, and may further provide valuable biological information on past animal life-history, behaviour and demography. However, the fragmented nature of the zooarchaeological record and a lack of clear diagnostic skeletal markers, often prevents such inference. Here, we test the usability of the dog nuclear genome (CanFam3.1) for sex identification of pinnipeds. First, a contemporary sample set (n=72) of ringed seals (Pusa hispida), with known sex was used to test the genetic sex identification method. By quantifying the proportion of X chromosome reads, as the chrX/chr1 ratio, the ratios clustered in two clearly distinguishable sex groups. Of the 72 individuals, 69 were identified to the accurate sex, which proves a high reliability of the genetic method. Second, random down sampling of a subset of the ringed seal samples to different read number, suggests at least 5000 DNA sequence reads mapped to the reference genome as the lower limit for which this method is applicable. Finally, applying this standard, sex identification was successfully carried out on a broad set of ancient pinniped samples, including walruses (Odobenus rosmarus), grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) and harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus), which all showed clearly distinct male and female chrX/chr1 ratio groups.