• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Open Access close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• Dataset close
• Australian Research Council (ARC) close

Taxonomic identification of archaeological fish bones provides important insights into the subsistence practices of ancient coastal peoples. However, it can be difficult to execute robust morphological identification of fish bones from species-rich fossil assemblages, especially from post-cranial material with few distinguishing features. Fragmentation, weathering and burning further impede taxonomic identification, resulting in large numbers of unidentifiable bones from archaeological sites. This limitation can be somewhat mitigated by taking an ancient DNA (aDNA) bulk-bone metabarcoding (BBM) approach to faunal identification, where DNA from non-diagnostic bone fragments is extracted and sequenced in parallel. However, a large proportion of fishing communities (both past and present) live in tropical regions that have sub-optimal conditions for long-term aDNA preservation. To date, the BBM method has never been applied to fish bones before, or to fossils excavated from an exposed context within a tropical climate. Here, we demonstrate that morphologically indistinct bulk fish bone from the tropics can be identified by sequencing aDNA extracted from 100 to 300 ya archaeological midden material in southwest Madagascar. Despite the biases of the approach, we rapidly obtained family, genus, and species-level assemblage information, and used this to describe a subset of the ichthyofauna exploited by an 18th century fishing community. We identified 23 families of fish, including benthic, pelagic, and coral-dwelling fishes, suggesting a reliance on a variety of marine and brackish habitats. When possible, BBM should be used alongside osteological approaches to address the limitations of both; however, this study highlights how genetic methods can nevertheless be a valuable tool for helping resolve faunal assemblages when morphological identification is hindered by taphonomic processes, lack of adequate comparative collections, and time constraints, and can provide a temporal perspective on fish biodiversity in the context of accelerated exploitation of the marine environment. Metabarcoding_DataTrimmed, quality filtered, chimera filtered, abundance filtered, and unique 12SrRNA metabarcoding reads for each DNA extract (including controls) sequenced.

2020-05-18 and 2020-05-25: Correction of depth values to meter (multiplication of prior values by 100), parameter set to "DEPTH, sediment/rock" (corrected meters composite depth) and "Depth, composite revised" (Equivalent depth of 339-U1385, corrected revised meters composite depth); update of PIs

Abstract of associated article: We examine the role of substitution from traditional to modern energy carriers and of differential rates of innovation in the use of each of these in economic growth in Sweden from 1850 to 1950. We use a simple growth model with a nested CES production function and exogenous factor-augmenting technological change and carry out a counterfactual simulation based on the econometric results. Even though the rate of technical change was higher for modern energy, innovation in the use of traditional energy carriers contributed more to growth between 1850 and 1890, since the cost share of traditional energy was so much larger than that of modern energy in that period. However, after 1890 we find that modern energy contributed much more to economic growth than traditional energy, but, increasingly, labor-augmenting technological change became the most important single driver of growth.

This dataset contains the model output from iLOVECLIM and its recently developed Pa/Th module for Pre-industrial equilibrium control run and Nordic Seas hosing experiments (freshwater addition in the Nordic Seas). The Pa/Th module computes the evolution of dissolved and particulate 231Pa and 230Th within the ocean model CLIO (3x3 degrees 20 vertical layers). For the Pre-Industrial control simulation, the dissolved and particulate 231Pa and 230Th activities are shown for the last 100 years of the equilibrium run (Figures 1, S1, S2). For the Nordic Seas hosing experiment (from Pre-Industrial equilibrium), the dataset contains the carbon isotopes and particulate Pa/Th responses and response times (as defined in Figure 2 - Figures 3, 4, S4, S5) as well as carbon isotopes and Pa/Th time series over the complete hosing simulation for 1) three selected locations in the Atlantic Basin (Figure 5) and the Bermuda rise (Figure 6).

Rapid changes in ocean circulation and climate have been observed in marine-sediment and ice cores over the last glacial period and deglaciation, highlighting the non-linear character of the climate system and underlining the possibility of rapid climate shifts in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. To date, these rapid changes in climate and ocean circulation are still not fully explained. One obstacle hindering progress in our understanding of the interactions between past ocean circulation and climate changes is the difficulty of accurately dating marine cores. Here, we present a set of 92 marine sediment cores from the Atlantic Ocean for which we have established age-depth models that are consistent with the Greenland GICC05 ice core chronology, and computed the associated dating uncertainties, using a new deposition modeling technique. This is the first set of consistently dated marine sediment cores enabling paleoclimate scientists to evaluate leads/lags between circulation and climate changes over vast regions of the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, this data set is of direct use in paleoclimate modeling studies.

Both computational models of English reading that generate word stress predict a processing advantage for words with initial syllable stress. They differ, however, on whether they process words incrementally and learn nonlinear spelling-stress relationships. Two experiments using event-related potentials were used to investigate these predictions. The first examined trisyllabic stimuli. Differences found on P200 and N400 components suggested a processing advantage for words with initial syllable stress. The second examined root morphemes within words that have high frequency suffixes that are stress predictive. A processing advantage on the N400 component was found with root morphemes that typically have initial syllable stress, even when the whole-word stress pattern differed. This provides evidence that stress is generated incrementally, where it is assigned to parts of words as they are processed, and that stress assignment is not necessarily affected by high frequency nonlinear relationships.

The exact timing, route, and process of the initial peopling of the Americas remains uncertain despite much research. Archaeological evidence indicates the presence of humans as far as southern Chile by 14.6 thousand years ago (ka), shortly after the Pleistocene ice sheets blocking access from eastern Beringia began to retreat. Genetic estimates of the timing and route of entry have been constrained by the lack of suitable calibration points and low genetic diversity of Native Americans. We sequenced 92 whole mitochondrial genomes from pre-Columbian South American skeletons dating from 8.6 to 0.5 ka, allowing a detailed, temporally calibrated reconstruction of the peopling of the Americas in a Bayesian coalescent analysis. The data suggest that a small population entered the Americas via a coastal route around 16.0 ka, following previous isolation in eastern Beringia for ~2.4 to 9 thousand years after separation from eastern Siberian populations. Following a rapid movement throughout the Americas, limited gene flow in South America resulted in a marked phylogeographic structure of populations, which persisted through time. All of the ancient mitochondrial lineages detected in this study were absent from modern data sets, suggesting a high extinction rate. To investigate this further, we applied a novel principal components multiple logistic regression test to Bayesian serial coalescent simulations. The analysis supported a scenario in which European colonization caused a substantial loss of pre-Columbian lineages. xml files for BEAST1.8.0A total of 370 whole mitochondrial genomes (WMGs) corresponding to Native Central and South American populations were collected from published studies. Of note, the large dataset of 215 Mexican WMGs from Kumar et al. 2011 was not used to prevent an over-representation of Mexican samples. We randomly selected three replicate datasets of 87 sequences, all of which contained exclusively the five Native American haplogroups A2, B2, C1, D1, and D4h3a (table S3). We added 20 East Siberian individuals from sister lineages within haplogroups A, B, C and D in order to estimate the time of the split between Siberian and American lineages. We also added the 92 ancient WMGs from the study, as well as the Anzick-1 mitogenome, to obtain three replicate datasets of 200 sequences. The Anzick-1 WMG was included as it added a deep time calibration at 12.6 kya, was the only ancient D4h3a sequence available, and because the Anzick-1 individual can reasonably be considered a descendant of the first wave of colonizers.xml_files_for_BEAST1.8.0.zip