Collaboration - ZooMS

Katerina Douka, Group Leader and Principal Investigator “FINDER” Project Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena, Germany

In the spring of 2018, we met in Bergen with members of the SapienCE team and agreed that undertaking proteomics analyses of faunal material from several South African Middle Stone Age sites, had the potential to answer fundamental research questions such as: (i) who made the material culture found in the archaeological layers of sites such as Klipdrift Shelter or Blombos Cave, (ii) what were the subsistence patterns (hunting strategies) of these groups of hunter-gatherers and (iii) what was the natural environment like 100 000 to 50 000 years ago?

Due to the fragmentary nature of mammal and micromammal bones recovered from many archaeological sites, identification is often limited to a small number of samples preserving clear diagnostic features. However, using a biomolecular approach called collagen fingerprinting, or ZooMS for short, we can now potentially identify small undiagnostic bone fragments quickly and relatively cheaply. However, we knew that the preservation of biomolecules in South Africa might be a limiting factor, which could hamper our analytical efforts.

In a feasibility study in the autumn of 2019, and in close collaboration with SapienCE post-doctoral fellow Turid Hillestad Nel, we were able to extract and fingerprint collagen from 23 (of the 72) samples analysed in our ZooMS laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. While this number may sound small, it is extremely exciting that 50 000 to 60 000 year old micromammal bones from South Africa preserve collagen. Continuing this work in 2020 is crucial if we are to unlock the full potential of these important sites and help the SapienCE team to answer fundamental questions about the origins of early human behaviour.