Radiocarbon dates, nitrogen, and carbon stable isotope data for various Equid bones collected in Alaska, 2015-2019

This data package is associated with the NSF Award # 1417036. Collaborative Research: Land Bridges, Ice-Free Corridors, and Biome Shifts: Impacts on the Evolution and Extinction of Horses in Ice-Age Beringia. This study asks: How important was connectivity among populations of large arctic mammal species for maintaining genetic diversity, influencing evolutionary change, and mitigating extinction risk? What types of barriers affected this connectivity, and how permeable were these barriers to gene flow? This study looks into how caballine horses, that inhabited ice-age Beringia (the biogeographic connector between Asia and North America), were affected by changes involving three different biogeographic barriers/corridors (1. the Bering Strait/Bering Land Bridge, which controlled dispersal and gene flow between Eurasia and Alaska; 2. the Ice-Free Corridor, which controlled gene flow between the Yukon and the Lower 48 States; and 3. biome shifts that periodically disrupted the spatial continuity of the Mammoth-Steppe, the unique ecosystem that stretched from France to the Yukon during the ice ages) during the last 30,000 years of the ice age. The specimens are currently in the Earth Sciences Collection at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum and are being curated by Pamela Groves and Daniel H. Mann. Each bone was sub-sampled for ancient DNA extraction, and sub-samples are currently in the collection of Paleogenomics lab UC Santa Cruz, curated by Alisa Vershinina.