Genome-scale sequencing and analysis of human, wolf, and bison DNA from 25,000-year-old sediment

Pere Gelabert (Corresponding author), Susanna Sawyer, Anders Bergström (Corresponding author), Ashot Margaryan, Thomas C Collin, Tengiz Meshveliani, Anna Belfer-Cohen, David Lordkipanidze, Nino Jakeli, Zinovi Matskevich, Guy Bar-Oz, Daniel M Fernandes, Olivia Cheronet, Kadir T Özdoğan, Victoria Oberreiter, Robin N M Feeney, Mareike C Stahlschmidt, Pontus Skoglund (Corresponding author), Ron Pinhasi (Corresponding author)

Publications: Contribution to journalArticlePeer Reviewed

Abstract

Cave sediments have been shown to preserve ancient DNA but so far have not yielded the genome-scale information of skeletal remains. We retrieved and analyzed human and mammalian nuclear and mitochondrial environmental "shotgun" genomes from a single 25,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic sediment sample from Satsurblia cave, western Georgia:first, a human environmental genome with substantial basal Eurasian ancestry, which was an ancestral component of the majority of post-Ice Age people in the Near East, North Africa, and parts of Europe; second, a wolf environmental genome that is basal to extant Eurasian wolves and dogs and represents a previously unknown, likely extinct, Caucasian lineage; and third, a European bison environmental genome that is basal to present-day populations, suggesting that population structure has been substantially reshaped since the Last Glacial Maximum. Our results provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere9
Pages (from-to)3564-3574
Number of pages11
JournalCurrent Biology
Volume31
Issue number16
Early online date12 Jul 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Aug 2021

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

  • 106018 Human biology

Keywords

  • ADMIXTURE
  • ALIGNMENT
  • ANCIENT DNA
  • CAVE
  • DENISOVAN DNA
  • MITOCHONDRIAL GENOMES
  • NEANDERTHAL
  • POPULATION-STRUCTURE
  • REVEALS
  • SUGGEST
  • Canis
  • enviromental DNA
  • soil sequencing
  • Caucasus
  • Upper Paleolithic
  • shotgun
  • bison
  • human

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