Tracing the introduction of domestic small bovids in Austral Africa using palaeoproteomics

Abstract : In Austral Africa, no remains of domestic caprines (sheep Ovis aries and goat Capra hircus) has never been found in archaeological assemblages. This suggests that those domestic animals have been introduced from the Near East to East Africa and then to the southern part of the continent (MacHugh, Larson & Orlando 2017, Vigne 2011). o Classical morphological determination of caprines from bone remains is often tricky due to the similarities between close related species as well as between domestic and wild species, fragmentation of the remains and bone diagenesis. o Paleoproteomics has revealed as a powerful approach for the distinction of domestic caprines (Buckley et al. 2010). We used this technique on remains from two Austral African sites considered as the oldest pastoral sites of the region: Leopard Cave in Namibia (Pleurdeau et al. 2012) and Toteng in Botswana (Robbins et al. 2008). Our objective was to ascertain the presence or absence of domestic animals at these sites. o Three different sample preparation protocols were tested in order to identify the best conditons for remains from arid environment. Bottom-up proteomics analysis was performed on an ESI-Q-TOF device with a data dependent autoMS/MS method. Modern samples from referential collections (MNHN) were also analyzed to constitute a database of unreported diagnostic peptides for species identification.