Ancient DNA-based sex determination of bison hide moccasins provides evidence for selective hunting strategies by Promontory Cave occupants ...

• Main Authors: Shirazi, Sabrina, Broomandkhoshbacht, Nasreen, Oppenheimer, Jonas, Metcalfe, Jessica, Found, Rob, Ives, John, Shapiro, Beth
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: Fulton; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7291/d17t1f; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.7291/D17T1F

The thirteenth-century human occupants of Promontory Cave, Utah, distinguished themselves from surrounding Fremont populations by being successful hunting specialists of bison in a region normally peripheral for that species. The hunters’ success is evident from the abundance of faunal remains excavated from the dry caves, which has facilitated zooarchaeological study of bison hunting strategies. The dry cave conditions also preserved hundreds of worn moccasins, which are of particular interest because of the Canadian-Subarctic style in which they are made and for their potential to reveal more about hunting strategies of their wearers. Here, we isolate ancient DNA from 38 Promontory Cave 1 (42BO1) moccasin and hide fragments and use these data to determine the species and sex of animals used to construct the moccasins. We found moccasins were mainly made from bison and most (87%) were females. The strong female bias in our data, which we demonstrate is a significant departure from sex ratios in present-day ... : We extracted DNA from hides and prepared the extracted DNA into genomic libraries for sequencing following protocols developed for working with degraded DNA (Fulton and Shapiro, 2019). Prior to extraction, we washed all samples with ultrapure water to remove surface debris. We extracted DNA following Dabney et al. (2013) and included one DNA extraction negative (no sample). Following extraction, we purified darkly colored extracts with polyvinylpolypyrrolidone in columns to remove PCR inhibitors following Arbeli and Fuentes (2007). We generated Illumina sequencing libraries following either Meyer and Kircher (MK) (2010) or, for the most recently processed samples, the Santa Cruz Reaction (SCR) (Kapp et al., 2021) (Table 1). The SCR is a single-stranded library preparation approach that more efficiently converts extracted DNA into sequenceable molecules compared to double-stranded approaches like MK (Kapp et al., 2021); we therefore prepared SCR libraries from samples initially prepared following MK but with ...