0000000000382757
AUTHOR
Pilar Utrilla
Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd…
Stable isotope ratio analysis of bone collagen as indicator of different environments conditions and dietary habits in Northeastern Iberia during the 4th and 3rd millenium calBC
The Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods are poorly understood in northeastern Iberia. Most of the information comes from the sepulchral structures rather than habitat settlements. The high number of individuals usually recovered from this types of collective burial spaces, together with the low number of direct radiocarbon dates available on them, forces us to be cautious and consider all the studied assemblages as belonging to the so-called Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic time period. To evaluate human dietary patterns of the Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic populations from the northeast of Iberia, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis was carried out on 78 humans and 32 faunal bones fro…
Reconstruction of human subsistence and husbandry strategies from the Iberian Early Neolithic: A stable isotope approach
Objectives The Early Neolithic involved an important social and economic shift that can be tested not only with the material culture, but also through biomolecular approaches. The Iberian Peninsula presents few Early Neolithic sites where fauna and humans can be analyzed together from an isotopic perspective. Here we present an isotopic study on the site of Cueva de Chaves as an example for understanding the dietary and economical changes that took place during Early Neolithic in Iberia. Material and methods Here we apply carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis to bone collagen from 4 humans and 64 faunal samples from 14 different species. The large dataset belongs to the same unique ch…
A Neandertal dietary conundrum: Insights provided by tooth enamel Zn isotopes from Gabasa, Spain
The characterization of Neandertals’ diets has mostly relied on nitrogen isotope analyses of bone and tooth collagen. However, few nitrogen isotope data have been recovered from bones or teeth from Iberia due to poor collagen preservation at Paleolithic sites in the region. Zinc isotopes have been shown to be a reliable method for reconstructing trophic levels in the absence of organic matter preservation. Here, we present the results of zinc (Zn), strontium (Sr), carbon (C), and oxygen (O) isotope and trace element ratio analysis measured in dental enamel on a Pleistocene food web in Gabasa, Spain, to characterize the diet and ecology of a Middle Paleolithic Neandertal individual. Based on…
Human responses to Younger Dryas in the Ebro valley and Mediterranean watershed (Eastern Spain)
The archaeological and chronological records of the Ebro River valley and the Mediterranean watershed (Eastern Spain) are examined to evaluate the effects of the Younger Dryas (Greenland Stadial 1) on the foragers of an area between 36
Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe represents an important test case for the study of human population movements during prehistoric periods. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the peninsula formed a periglacial refugium [1] for hunter-gatherers (HGs) and thus served as a potential source for the re-peopling of northern latitudes [2]. The post-LGM genetic signature was previously described as a cline from Western HG (WHG) to Eastern HG (EHG), further shaped by later Holocene expansions from the Near East and the North Pontic steppes [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Western and central Europe were dominated by ancestry associated with the ∼14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy…