Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus

作者：Palesa P. Madupe, Palesa P. Madupe, Claire Koenig, Ioannis Patramanis, Patrick Rüther, Nomawethu Hlazo, Meaghan Mackie, Mirriam Tawane, Johanna Krueger, Alberto J. Taurozzi, Gaudry Troché, Job M. Kibii, Robyn Pickering, Marc R. Dickinson, Yonatan Sahle, Dipuo Kgotleng, Charles M. Musiba, Fredrick K. Manthi, Liam Bell, Michelle DuPlessis, Catherine Gilbert, Bernhard Zipfel, Lukas F. K. Kuderna, Esther Lizano, Frido Welker, Pelagia Kyriakidou, Jürgen Cox, Catherine Mollereau, Caroline Tokarski, Jonathan M. Blackburn, Jazmín Ramos‐Madrigal, Tomàs Marquès‐Bonet, Kirsty Penkman, Clément Zanolli, Lauren Schroeder, Fernando Racimo, Jesper V. Olsen, R. Ackermann, Enrico Cappellini · 发表于：Science · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1126/science.adt9539 · 被引用次数：21 · 研究领域：Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology、Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies、Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Paranthropus robustus is a morphologically well-documented Early Pleistocene hominin species from southern Africa with no genetic evidence reported so far. In this work, we describe the mass spectrometric sequencing of enamel peptides from four ~2 million–year-old dental specimens attributed morphologically to P. robustus from the site of Swartkrans in South Africa. The identification of AMELY-specific peptides enabled us to assign two specimens to male individuals, whereas semiquantitative mass spectrometric data analysis attributed the other two to females. A single amino acid polymorphism and the enamel-dentine junction shape variation indicated potential subgroups present within southern African Paranthropus . This study demonstrates how palaeoproteomics can help distinguish sexual dimorphism from other sources of variation in African Early Pleistocene hominins.