The name of the game: Palaeoproteomics and radiocarbon dates further refine the presence and dispersal of caprines in Eastern and Southern Africa

We report the first large-scale palaeoproteomics research on eastern and southern African zooarchaeological samples, thereby refining our understanding of early caprine (sheep and goat) pastoralism in Africa. Assessing caprine introductions is a complicated task because of their skeletal similarity to endemic wild bovid species and the sparse and fragmentary state of relevant archaeological remains. Palaeoproteomics has previously proved effective in clarifying species attributions in African zooarchaeological materials, but few comparative protein sequences of wild bovid species have been available. Using newly generated collagen type I sequences for wild species, as well as previously published sequences, we assess species attributions for elements originally identified as caprine or “unidentifiable bovid” from seventeen eastern and southern African sites that span seven millennia. We identified over 70% of the archaeological remains and the direct radiocarbon dating of domesticate sp..., “Modern” and archaeological samples protein extraction
Both reference specimen samples and archaeological samples underwent the same preparation protocol for protein extraction. Briefly, ten to twenty milligrams of bone or tooth powder were sampled using an ethanol clean diamond drill (Supplementary Table 2). The archaeological specimens from Wakarida were mandibles with their teeth and were thus sampled twice to assess the best tissue for sampling. For these, we took one bone sample and another dentine sample, for which organic preservation was assessed using the method described in Lebon et al. (2016). Only the best-preserved sample according to the threshold discussed in Le Meillour et al. (2018) is presented here (Supplementary Table 2).
After sampling, bone powders were placed in protein LoBind 2mL tubes (Eppendorf, Germany). We followed the protocol for African remains, which is appropriate for the extraction and characterisation of proteins from remains recovered from arid envir..., MaxQuant 2.3.0 (open source),