• A new genus of horse from Pleistocene North America 

      Heintzman, Peter D.; Zazula, Grant D.; MacPhee, Ross D. E.; Scott, Eric; Cahill, James A.; McHorse, Brianna K.; Kapp, Joshua D.; Stiller, Mathias; Wooller, Matthew J.; Orlando, Ludovic; Southon, John R.; Froese, Duane G.; Shapiro, Beth (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2017-11-28)
      The extinct ‘New World stilt-legged’, or NWSL, equids constitute a perplexing group of Pleistocene horses endemic to North America. Their slender distal limb bones resemble those of Asiatic asses, such as the Persian onager. Previous palaeogenetic studies, however, have suggested a closer relationship to caballine horses than to Asiatic asses. Here, we report complete mitochondrial and partial nuclear ...
    • Paleoeconomy more than demography determined prehistoric human impact in Arctic Norway 

      Brown, Antony; Rijal, Dilli Prasad; Heintzman, Peter D.; Clarke, Charlotte, L.; Blankholm, Hans Peter; Høeg, Helge I.; Lammers, Youri; Bråthen, Kari Anne; Edwards, M E; Alsos, Inger Greve (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2022-10-07)
      Population size has increasingly been taken as the driver of past human environmental impact worldwide, and particularly in the Arctic. However, sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), pollen and archaeological data show that over the last 12,000 years, paleoeconomy and culture determined human impacts on the terrestrial ecology of Arctic Norway. The large Mortensnes site complex (Ceavccagea ¯dgi, 70◦N) ...
    • Postglacial species arrival and diversity buildup of northern ecosystems took millennia 

      Alsos, Inger Greve; Rijal, Dilli Prasad; Ehrich, Dorothee; Karger, Dirk Nikolaus; Yoccoz, Nigel; Heintzman, Peter D.; Brown, Antony; Lammers, Youri; Pellissier, Loïc; Alm, Torbjørn; Bråthen, Kari Anne; Coissac, Eric; Merkel, Marie Føreid; Alberti, Adriana; Denoeud, France; Bakke, Jostein (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2022-09-28)
      What drives ecosystem buildup, diversity, and stability? We assess species arrival and ecosystem changes across 16 millennia by combining regional-scale plant sedimentary ancient DNA from Fennoscandia with near-complete DNA and trait databases. We show that postglacial arrival time varies within and between plant growth forms. Further, arrival times were mainly predicted by adaptation to temperature, ...
    • Pre-extinction demographic stability and genomic signatures of adaptation in the woolly rhinoceros 

      Lord, Edana; Dussex, Nicolas; Kierczak, Marcin; Díez-del-Molino, David; Ryder, Oliver A.; Stanton, David W. G.; Gilbert, Marcus Thomas Pius; Sánchez-Barreiro, Fatima; Zhang, Guojie; Sinding, Mikkel-Holger S.; Lorenzen, Eline D.; Willerslev, Eske; Protopov, Albert; Shidlovskiy, Fedor K.; Fedorov, Sergey; Bocherens, Hervé; Nathan, Senthilvel K.S.S.; Goossens, Benoit; van der Plicht, Johannes; Chan, Yvonne L.; Prost, Stefan; Potapova, Olga R; Kirillova, Irina V.; Lister, Adrian M.; Heintzman, Peter D.; Kapp, Joshua D.; Shapiro, Beth; Vartanyan, Sergey; Götherström, Anders; Dalén, Love (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2020-08-13)
      Ancient DNA has significantly improved our understanding of the evolution and population history of extinct megafauna. However, few studies have used complete ancient genomes to examine species responses to climate change prior to extinction. The woolly rhinoceros (<i>Coelodonta antiquitatis</i>) was a cold-adapted megaherbivore widely distributed across northern Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene ...
    • Sedimentary ancient DNA reveals local vegetation changes driven by glacial activity and climate. 

      Elliott, Lucas Dane; Rijal, Dilli Prasad; Brown, Antony; Bakke, Jostein; Topstad, Lasse; Heintzman, Peter D.; Alsos, Inger Greve (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2023-01-07)
      Disentangling the effects of glaciers and climate on vegetation is complicated by the confounding role that climate plays in both systems. We reconstructed changes in vegetation occurring over the Holocene at Jøkelvatnet, a lake located directly downstream from the Langfjordjøkel glacier in northern Norway. We used a sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) metabarcoding dataset of 38 samples from a ...
    • Sedimentary ancient DNA shows terrestrial plant richness continuously increased over the Holocene in northern Fennoscandia 

      Rijal, Dilli Prasad; Heintzman, Peter D.; Lammers, Youri; Yoccoz, Nigel; Lorberau, Kelsey; Pitelkova, Iva; Goslar, Tomasz; Murguzur, Francisco Javier Ancin; Salonen, J. Sakari; Helmens, Karin F.; Bakke, Jostein; Edwards, Mary E.; Alm, Torbjørn; Bråthen, Kari Anne; Brown, Antony; Alsos, Inger Greve (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2021-07-30)
      The effects of climate change on species richness are debated but can be informed by the past. Here, we generated a sedimentary ancient DNA dataset covering 10 lakes and applied novel methods for data harmonization. We assessed the impact of Holocene climate changes and nutrients on terrestrial plant richness in northern Fennoscandia. We find that richness increased steeply during the rapidly warming ...
    • The sedimentary ancient DNA workflow 

      Heintzman, Peter D.; Nota, Kevin; Rouillard, Alexandra; Lammers, Youri; Murchie, Tyler; Armbrecht, Linda; Garcés-Pastor, Sandra; Vernot, Benjamin (Chapter; Bokkapittel, 2023)
      Sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) is continuing to revolutionise our understanding of past biological and geological processes by retrieving and analysing the ancient DNA preserved in lake, cave, open terrestrial, midden, permafrozen, and marine environments (Crump, 2021). The study of sedaDNA began in the late 1990s (Coolen and Overmann, 1998) with the first reports of extinct animal sedaDNA in ...