Assessing past fish distribution through collagen fingerprints: a study on archaeological remains of Salmonids
Résumé
Paleoecological studies provide critical evidence for understanding aquatic ecosystem functions and their responses to climate change. Fish remains are often abundant in prehistoric and historical archaeological sites. They are increasingly used to explore past human subsistence activities and diet, but they are also an invaluable record of past distributions and evolution of particular fish species. Vertebrae are usually the most frequent osseous fish components retrieved during excavations and are suitable for various analyses, from morphological to biomolecular. A key prerequisite to fully exploit this resource is species identification, a task that is difficult in the cases of phenotypically close sister species living in sympatry, as is true for brown trout (Salmo trutta) and Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) along the European Atlantic coast. For salmonids, some criteria for morphological species identification do exist, but their accuracy is limited. Moreover, although genetic identification is an alternative, its cost prohibits the screening of large archaeological samples. We decided to tackle the issue by leveraging the collagen peptide signature through a technique known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), a biomolecular method used in archaeozoology for taxon identification up to the species level, including for fish. In our work, we applied ZooMS on more than 130 salmonid samples from northern Atlantic Spain dated to the Upper Palaeolithic. In this presentation, we report the results of our work that we believe important for assessing the potential and sensibility of the ZooMS method for accurately identifying prehistoric fish remains.
| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
|---|---|
| Licence |
