Early cave art and ancient DNA record the origin of European bison
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Date
2016-10-18Author
Soubrier, Julien
Gower, Graham
Chen, Kefei
Richards, Stephen M
Llamas, Bastien
Mitchell, Kieren J
Ho, Simon Y W
Kosintsev, Pavel
Lee, Michael S Y
Baryshnikov, Gennady
Bollongino, Ruth
Bover, Pere
Burger, Joachim
Chivall, David
Cregut-Bonnoure, Evelyne
Decker, JaredE
Doronichev, Vladimir B
Douka, Katerina
Fordham, Damien A
Fontana, Federica
Fritz, Carole
Glimmerveen, Jan
Golovanova, Liubov V
Groves, Colin
Guerreschi, Antonio
Haak, Wolfgang
Higham, Tom
Hofman-Kaminska, Emilia
Immel, Alexander
Julien, Marie-Anne
Krause, Johannes
Krotova, Oleksandra
Langbein, Frauke
Larson, Greger
Rohrlach, Adam
Scheu, Amelie
Schnabel, Robert D
Taylor, Jeremy F
Tokarska, Małgorzata
Tosello, Gilles
van der Plicht, Johannes
van Loenen, Ayla
Vigne, Jean-Denis
Wooley, Oliver
Orlando, Ludovic
Kowalczyk, Rafał
Shapiro, Beth
Cooper, Alan
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The two living species of bison (European and American) are among the few terrestrial megafauna to have survived the late Pleistocene extinctions. Despite the extensive bovid fossil record in Eurasia, the evolutionary history of the European bison (or wisent, Bison bonasus) before the Holocene (<11.7 thousand years ago (kya)) remains a mystery. We use complete ancient mitochondrial genomes and genome-wide nuclear DNA surveys to reveal that the wisent is the product of hybridization between the extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus) and ancestors of modern cattle (aurochs, Bos primigenius) before 120 kya, and contains up to 10% aurochs genomic ancestry. Although undetected within the fossil record, ancestors of the wisent have alternated ecological dominance with steppe bison in association with major environmental shifts since at least 55 kya. Early cave artists recorded distinct morphological forms consistent with these replacement events, around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ∼21–18 kya).
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