The genome and diet of a 35,000-year-old Canis lupus specimen from the Paleolithic painted cave, Chauvet-Pont d'Arc, France.

ABSTRACT: The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave (Ardèche, France) contains some of the oldest Paleolithic paintings recorded to date, as well as thousands of bones of the extinct cave bear, and some remains and footprints of other animals. As part of the interdisciplinary research project devoted to this reference cave site, we analyzed a coprolite collected within the deep cave. AMS radiocarbon dating of bone fragments from the coprolite yielded an age of 30,450 ± 550 RC yr. BP (AAR-19656; 36,150-34,000 cal BP), similar to ages assigned to Paleolithic artwork and cave bear remains from the same cave sector. Using high-throughput shotgun DNA sequencing, we demonstrated a high abundance of canid DNA and lesser amounts of DNA from the extinct cave bear. We interpret the sample as feces from a canid that had con

SUBMITTER: Elalouf JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10231653 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature