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. 2017 Dec 18;7(1):17714.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17723-1.

Central European Woolly Mammoth Population Dynamics: Insights from Late Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes

James A Fellows Yates  1   2 , Dorothée G Drucker  3   4 , Ella Reiter  5 , Simon Heumos  5   6 , Frido Welker  7 , Susanne C Münzel  5 , Piotr Wojtal  8 , Martina Lázničková-Galetová  9   10   11   12 , Nicholas J Conard  4   13 , Alexander Herbig  5   14 , Hervé Bocherens  3   4 , Johannes Krause  15   16
Affiliations

Central European Woolly Mammoth Population Dynamics: Insights from Late Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes

James A Fellows Yates et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The population dynamics of the Pleistocene woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) has been the subject of intensive palaeogenetic research. Although a large number of mitochondrial genomes across Eurasia have been reconstructed, the available data remains geographically sparse and mostly focused on eastern Eurasia. Thus, population dynamics in other regions have not been extensively investigated. Here, we use a multi-method approach utilising proteomic, stable isotope and genetic techniques to identify and generate twenty woolly mammoth mitochondrial genomes, and associated dietary stable isotopic data, from highly fragmentary Late Pleistocene material from central Europe. We begin to address region-specific questions regarding central European woolly mammoth populations, highlighting parallels with a previous replacement event in eastern Eurasia ten thousand years earlier. A high number of shared derived mutations between woolly mammoth mitochondrial clades are identified, questioning previous phylogenetic analysis and thus emphasizing the need for nuclear DNA studies to explicate the increasingly complex genetic history of the woolly mammoth.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Bayesian phylogenetic tree of all previously published woolly mammoth mammoths mitochondrial genomes–,– and 20 mitochondrial genomes presented here (in bold). Node values represent posterior probability values from 100,000,000 steps for the bayesian tree. For visibility reasons, only support values related to the relationship of the three clades are shown. Clades are indicated by the following colours: Blue - I; Purple - II; Green - III. Radiocarbon dates in sample names are uncalibrated. The full tree as well as Neighbour-Joining, Maximum Parsimony and Likelihood trees can be found in Supplementary Figures S4–S7. Trees were generated using Figtree (tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/) and modified in Inkscape (inkscape.org).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Time series of all genetically typed and radiocarbon dated European woolly mammoths from this study (diamonds), and dated HVR samples and full mitochondrial genomes analysed in, (circles). Time slices are in uncalibrated BP. Clade III lineages (green) are present until 25 ky BP in Germany, but clade I (blue) is now shown to be present in central Europe by 24 ka BP (27 ka cal BP), as represented by the new Kraków Spadzista mitochondrial sequences. Maps were generated in R using the ggplot2 package and modified in Inkscape (inkscape.org).
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