Were domestic camelids present on the prehispanic South American agricultural frontier? An ancient DNA study

ABBONA, CINTHIA CAROLINA; ADOLFO, GUSTAVO NEME; JOHNSON, JEFF; KIM, TRACY; GIL, ADOLFO FABIAN; WOLVERTON, STEVE

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Año: 2020 vol. 15

1932-6203

The southern boundary of prehispanic farming in South America occurs in central MendozaProvince, Argentina at approximately 34 degrees south latitude. Archaeological evidence offarming includes the recovery of macrobotanical remains of cultigens and isotopic chemistryof human bone. Since the 1990s, archaeologists have also hypothesized that the llama(Lama glama), a domesticated South American camelid, was also herded near the southernboundary of prehispanic farming. The remains of a wild congeneric camelid, the guanaco(Lama guanicoe), however, are common in archaeological sites throughout Mendoza Province.It is difficult to distinguish bones of the domestic llama from wild guanaco in terms ofosteological morphology, and therefore, claims that llama were in geographic areas whereguanaco were also present based on osteometric analysis alone remain equivocal. A recentstudy, for example, claimed that twenty-five percent of the camelid remains from the highelevation Andes site of Laguna del Diamante S4 were identified based on osteometric evidenceas domestic llama, but guanaco are also a likely candidate since the two speciesoverlap in size. We test the hypothesis that domesticated camelids occurred in prehispanic,southern Mendoza through analysis of ancient DNA. We generated whole mitochondrialgenome datasets from 41 samples from southern Mendoza late Holocene archaeologicalsites, located between 450 and 3400 meters above sea level (masl). All camelid samplesfrom those sites were identified as guanaco; thus, we have no evidence to support thehypothesis that the domestic llama occurred in prehispanic southern Mendoza