Paleogenomic sex inference of mammoth remains sheds light on the anthropogenic nature of bone accumulations

作者：Hannah M. Moots, Juliana Larsdotter, Gonzalo Oteo-García, Marianne Dehasque, Florentine Tubbesing, Jessica A. Thomas Thorpe, Georgios Xenikoudakis, Francesca Di Paolo, Sofia Selvatici, J. Camilo Chacón-Duque, Muhammad Bilal Sharif, Kelsey Moreland, Patrícia Pečnerová, Foteini Kanellidou, Chris Baumann, Amy Collins, Patrick Druckenmiller, Johanna L. A. Paijmans, Axel Barlow, Helen Fewlass, Ursula B. Göhlich, Peter D. Heintzman, Anna Kwiatkowski, Georgiy Pavlyukov, Natasja den Ouden, Lars van den Hoek Ostende, Ian Barnes, Alexei Tikhonov, A. V. Protopopov, Michael V. Westbury, Beth Shapiro, Adrian M. Lister, Lembi Lõugas, Laura Termes, Michael P. Richards, Pavel Nikolskiy, Valerii Plotnikov, Anders Angerbjörn, Gleb Danilov, Sergey Vartanyan, Kerstin Pasda, Martina Roblíčková, Martina Lázničková-Galetová, Dorothée G. Drucker, Martin Novák, Soňa Herčíková, Alexander J.E. Pryor, Tom van der Valk, Mietje Germonpré, Michael Hofreiter, Matthew J. Wooller, Marc Händel, Jarosław Wilczyñski, Love Dalén, David Díez‐del‐Molino · 发表于：Current Biology · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1016/j.cub.2026.07.023 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology、Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies、Paleopathology and ancient diseases

Here, we use ancient DNA to investigate site-formation hypotheses by comparing genetic sex ratios from mammoth remains recovered in putative anthropogenic bone accumulations and from geographically dispersed, non-anthropogenic contexts. We studied genome-wide data from 521 woolly mammoths-including 100 mammoths from bone accumulation sites and 421 mammoths from natural depositional settings across Eurasia and North America-of which 448 are newly generated. Genetic sex determination reveals a striking contrast between contexts: mammoths from dispersed sites show a male bias (∼66.5%), which is consistent with the heightened vulnerability of solitary males to hazards such as natural traps, where bones are more likely to be preserved, whereas mammoths from anthropogenic bone accumulations are predominantly female (∼70%). This female bias is pervasive across multiple sites, indicating an anthropogenic origin for these accumulations as a result of Upper Paleolithic hunters preferentially exploiting female mammoths, possibly derived from herd contexts. Together, these results provide population-scale genetic evidence that highlights the central role of mammoths in the subsistence and material economies of some Paleolithic communities.