Dorothée G. Drucker

Senckenberg Research Institute, HEP Tübingen · Universität Tübingen Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP)

Evolutionary biologists have recently solicited archaeologists to help document and understand the morphological evolution of animals in response to human activities and, more generally, to help reconstruct the history and significance of the anthropogenic impact on worldwide ecosystems. Artificial selection associated with domestication is the bes...

Modern humans have populated Europe for more than 45,000 years1,2. Our knowledge of the genetic relatedness and structure of ancient hunter-gatherers is however limited, owing to the scarceness and poor molecular preservation of human remains from that period³. Here we analyse 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes, including new genomic data for 116...

Supplementary information to the Poster "Foxes as proxy for human activities in the past: Isotopic evidence from Southwest Germany"

The paleoecology of the giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus), including its dietary preferences, is poorly known, mainly because reconstructions based on morphological characteristics have produced contradictory results. In this study, we propose to reconstruct the diet of the giant deer from five archaeological sites located in Southern Germany and...

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day do...

This paper is an introduction to the topical collection dealing with the Post-glacial human subsistence and settlement patterns: insights from bones. The context of the Lateglacial and Early Holocene (ca. 16,000–6000 cal BP) in Europe offers the possibility to examine the response of terrestrial ecosystems to dramatic climatic changes and the evolu...

The Mammoth Steppe was the dominant terrestrial biome of the Northern Hemisphere during the late Pleistocene. It encompassed a nonanalog community of animals living in a cold and treeless steppe-tundra landscape. The high diversity of species, including megafauna, could be supported by a productive environment. The carbon-13 and nitrogen-15 abundan...

Carbon and nitrogen isotopic composition of bone collagen in woolly mammoths, coeval her-bivores and predators, as well as hominins, allow researchers to quantify the proportion of meat consumed by late Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe. The proportions of consumed mammoth meat were found to be very high for late Neanderthals in sites...

The question, whether a dog is a dog or rather a wolf, is highly debated in the field of zooarchaeology, paleogenetic, and stable isotopes. Recent evidence points towards an onset of wolf domestication in south-western Germany and northern Switzerland at around 16 to 15,000 years ago. Regarding diet of wolves and potential dogs, both groups fed on...

Significance The microbiome plays key roles in human health, but little is known about its evolution. We investigate the evolutionary history of the African hominid oral microbiome by analyzing dental biofilms of humans and Neanderthals spanning the past 100,000 years and comparing them with those of chimpanzees, gorillas, and howler monkeys. We id...

The Final Gravettian in Europe overlapped with the cold and dry climatic event of Heinrich 2 (ca. 27–23.5 kyr cal BP), which caused the contraction of human distribution over refuge regions in the southern peninsulas of Europe. Here, we consider the human subsistence in the northeast Iberian Peninsula, where an extensive range of small to large pre...

The question, whether a dog is a dog or rather a wolf, became recently highly debated. Recent evidence points towards an onset of domestication at around 16 to 15,000 years ago including an intriguing example of the Kesslerloch cave (CH), where beside wolf remains, one large canid has been morphologically and genetically confirmed as dog. Regarding...

Dogs are known to be the oldest animals domesticated by humans. Although many studies have examined wolf domestication, the geographic and temporal origin of this process is still being debated. To address this issue, our study sheds new light on the early stages of wolf domestication during the Magdalenian period (16–14 ka cal BP) in the Hegau Jur...

Caverne X in Waulsort (Namur province, Belgium), excavated in the 19 th century, revealed a burial site which was unexpectedly dated to the Final Upper Paleolithic (10,820 ± 80 BP, OxA-6856) in the 1990's. A re-examination of the collection and a new radiocarbon dating program was recently undertaken. The dates obtained on four left femurs (9285 ±...

During the past several decades, the paleoecology of the Mammuthus-Coelodonta Faunal Complex in the Palearctic has been thoroughly explored, especially using stable isotope analysis. Numerous studies have documented high ecological plasticity and regional heterogeneities for this fauna. However, very limited attention has focused on Northeast Asia,...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The Late-Glacial period offers a key window into the expansion of temperate species from southern refugia towards northern areas and the impact of faunal change on hunting strategies. In the Jura and in the Alps, the arrival of red deer and the withdrawal of reindeer are coeval with the warming of the GI-1e. Very little is known about roe deer, how...

The Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany is famous for its Paleolithic sites which have been studied since the 1860s. While there is a rich tradition of research on the Magdalenian, many of the best-known sites were not excavated using modern methods, and recently, few discoveries of new sites have been made. Thus, much of the information on this p...

GfBS Newsletter 37

The Late Glacial and early Holocene (ca. 15,000–6,000 cal BP) witnessed major changes in the environmental conditions which led to the establishment of temperate vegetation and animal species, thereby offering new subsistence opportunities to the population of hunter-gatherers. Measurements of the relative abundances in 13C and 15N were applied to...

Nowadays, opportunistic small predators, such as foxes (Vulpes vulpes and Vulpes lagopus), are well known to be very adaptable to human modified ecosystems. However, the timing of the start of this phenomenon in terms of human impact on ecosystems and of the implications for foxes has hardly been studied. We hypothesize that foxes can be used as an...

During the Last Glacial cycle (from MIS-4 to MIS-2), the isthmic Pyrenees mountain range acted as a biogeographical barrier, effectively restricting faunal exchanges to its western and eastern terminations. The study of the composition of megaherbivore communities has revealed the transitional character of the Cantabrian region (northwest Iberian P...

Heavy reliance on plants is rare in Carnivora and mostly limited to relatively small species in subtropical settings. The feeding behaviors of extinct cave bears living during Pleistocene cold periods at middle latitudes have been intensely studied using various approaches including isotopic analyses of fossil collagen. In contrast to cave bears fr...

Among other large mammals, the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) is a species widely documented during the Late Glacial in Northern Europe. It is present at many archeological sites and has the potential to provide information about environmental conditions through analysis of the paleodiet. Among other techniques, tooth wear analyses allow for the infe...

Paleoenvironmental and climatic reconstructions are reported for latest Pleistocene (Paleolithic) contexts from the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany. In particular, we focus on the late glacial interval, ~18,000 to 11,600 cal yr BP, using faunal remains from Langmahdhalde, a recently excavated Late Magdalenian site in the Lone Valley. We use tw...

Fox (Vulpes vulpes and Vulpes lagopus), wolf (Canis lupus) and dog (Canis lupus familiaris) remains are commonly found in the faunal assemblages of Magdalenian sites in Central Europe. However, little is known about their ecology in terms of food preference and niche partitioning. We hypothesize that domestication leads to a new trophic niche for d...

Three elk (Alces alces) bones found in 1955 in Zug-Gartenstadt, Switzerland, two shoulder blades and a tibia fragment, have been analysed anew: They date to the Late Ice Age around 12400 BP (12776-12220 calBC) according to two C14 dates - the finds are currently the oldest known elk bones in Switzerland after the Last Glacial Maximum and represent...

The world's last population of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) lived on Wrangel Island persisting well into the Holocene, going extinct at ca. 4000 cal BP. According to the frequency of radiocarbon dated mammoth remains from the island, the extinction appears fairly abrupt. This study investigates the ecology of the Wrangel Island mammoth p...

The cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) is one of the Late Pleistocene megafauna species that faced extinction at the end of the last ice age. Although it is represented by one of the largest fossil records in Europe and has been subject to several interdisciplinary studies including palaeogenetic research, its fate remains highly controversial. Here, we us...

Climate warming and human landscape transformation during the Holocene resulted in environmental changes for wild animals. The last remnants of the European Pleistocene megafauna that survived into the Holocene were particularly vulnerable to changes in habitat. To track the response of habitat use and foraging of large her-bivores to natural and a...

Only 21 human remains have been identified at Zamostje 2, despite extraordinarily good conditions for organic preservation, and the recovery of thousands of animal bones from layers dating from the Late Mesolithic to the Middle Neolithic (c.6500–4000 cal BC). Almost all the human remains are fragments of the cranium, maxilla, mandible, which are po...

Hominin evolution is characterized by progressive regional differentiation, as well as migration waves, leading to anatomically modern humans that are assumed to have emerged in Africa and spread over the whole world. Why or whether Africa was the source region of modern humans and what caused their spread remains subject of ongoing debate. We pres...

Rationale The trophic enrichment factor (TEF) is a parameter reflecting the difference in isotopic ratio between a consumer's tissues and diet, used in isotopic ecology and paleoecology to track dietary habits. The TEF of sulfur is believed to be low, but was, until now, only documented in a limited number of taxa. In this study we use a subfossil...

Determination of the relationship between p and s, as well as the model time step. A. The factor p as a function of competitive advantage s and population size N. Each data point is represents the average 10,000 simulations for a give N and s. Slopes (dP/ds) are determined by linear least-squares best fits (dashed lines). B. A regression (dashed li...

Supporting information on methods. The text explains the relationship between advantage factor (p) and competitive advantage (s) and how the duration of one time step (Δt) is derived. (PDF)

Workflow of the numerical implementation of the model. Individual loops are given in different colours. (TIF)

Paleodietary research is a complex field, which requires large sets of background information. Owing to increasing interest and activity in the field, a substantial amount of archaeological isotope baseline data exist for Northern Europe, consisting mainly of animal bone collagen δ13C, δ15N, and δ34S values. However, the data are scattered into doz...

Correlating cultural, technological and ecological aspects of both Upper pleistocene modern humans (UpMHs) and Neandertals provides a useful approach for achieving robust predictions about what makes us human. Here we present ecological information for a period of special relevance in human evolution, the time of replacement of Neandertals by moder...

European bison ( Bison bonasus ) are the largest endemic vertebrates in Europe, and one of the few megafaunal species to have survived the mass megafaunal extinction during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (12-9 thousand years ago). Untangling their evolutionary history would provide valuable information about the response of European megafauna...

The arrival of modern humans into Europe, their dispersal and their potential interactions with Neanderthals are still in debate. Whereas the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Western Europe seems to be well understood, the situation is quite different for Eastern Europe, where data are more scarce. The Buran-Kaya III site in Crimea...

In 2015 the skeletal remains of a late glacial bull mammoth, approximately 17,000 years old, were discovered in Risch-Rotkreuz (Canton Zug, Switzerland, location: https://s.geo.admin.ch/7d5a3a861a), see https://goo.gl/2Efdze for the original publication. In the meantime bones and tusk have been analysed both for stable isotopes and aDNA (see https:...

Hominin evolution is characterized by progressive regional differentiation, as well as migration waves, leading to anatomically modern humans that are assumed to have emerged in Africa and spread over the whole world. Why or whether Africa was the source region of modern humans and what caused their spread remains subject of ongoing debate. We pres...

Reconstruction of mammoth and elephant diet using stable isotopes and tooth microwear (in French, for general public)

In north-eastern France, red deer (Cervus elaphus L.) populations were rebuilt from a few hundred individuals, which have subsisted in remote valleys of the Vosges mountains, and to a lesser extent from individuals escaped from private enclosures; at present times, this species occupies large areas, mainly in the Vosges Mountains. In this study, we...

Higher δ ¹⁵ N values in bone collagen of mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) compared with coeval large herbivores is a classic trait of the mammoth steppe. An exception applies to the Epigravettian site of Mezhyrich (ca. 18–17.4 ka cal BP) in the central East European plains, where mammoth bones have δ ¹⁵ N values equivalent to or in a lower range t...

We investigated the contribution of freshwater resources to the diet of seven Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (ca. 5300–7000 BC) from Northern France and Luxembourg using stable isotope ratios. In addition to the carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios (δ13C, δ15N), we explored the potential of the sulphur isotopic ratios (δ34S) to detect and qu...

European farmers' first strides from the south The early spread of farmers across Europe has previously been thought to be part of a single migration event. David Reich and colleagues analyse genome-wide data from 225 individuals who lived in southeastern Europe and the surrounding regions between 12000 and 500 BC. They analyse this in combination...