Mitochondrial DNA from Borsuka Cave

Six infant human teeth and 112 animal tooth pendants previously found at Borsuka Cave in Poland were thought to be from a burial. Uncertainties around the dating of the assemblage and the association between the teeth and pendants have precluded their association to a specific archaeological industry. In this study, we combined dating and genetic analyses of a selection of the human teeth and herbivore tooth pendants to address these questions. We confirmed the Palaeolithic origin of the human remains and herbivore tooth pendants and identified the infant as female. 

Methods
DNA was extracted from the human tooth C7/675 following the automated extraction protocol in Rohland et al., 2018 with buffer 'D'. The recovered DNA was then converted into single-stranded DNA libraries (Gansauge et al., 2020) and enriched for human mtDNA via hybridization capture before sequencing. Only putatively deaminated fragments were used for reconstructing an mtDNA genome. This genome was then aligned to the revised Cambridge reference sequence along with a selection of previously published human mtDNA genomes and one previously published Neandertal mtDNA genome. This multiple sequence alignment was then used for molecular branch shortening and tree building.