Ancient DNA-based sex determination of bison hide moccasins indicates Promontory cave occupants selected female hides for footwear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thirteenth-century human occupants of the Promontory caves, Utah, distinguished themselves from surrounding Fremont populations by being successful hunting specialists of bison in a region normally peripheral for that species. The hunters’ success is evident from the abundance of faunal remains excavated from the dry caves. The dry cave conditions also preserved hundreds of worn moccasins, which are of particular interest because of the Canadian-Subarctic style in which they are made, and for their potential to reveal more about the hunting strategies of their wearers. Here, we isolate ancient DNA from 38 Promontory Cave 1 (42BO1) moccasin and hide fragments and use these data to determine the species and sex of animals used to construct the moccasins. We found that moccasins from which we could isolate DNA were all made from bison and most (87%) were females. The strong female bias in our data, which we demonstrate is a significant departure from sex ratios in present-day bison herds, suggests that the occupants of the cave were purposefully targeting female bison for moccasin manufacture. Our study is the first to our knowledge to determine faunal sex ratios from an assemblage of archaeological leather and highlights another potential avenue for ancient DNA technologies to augment what can be learned from the archaeological record.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".