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Geneticists discover new wild goat subspecies via ancient DNA

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Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, together with a team of international collaborators, have discovered a previously unknown lineage of wild goats over ten millennia old. The research has just been published in the journal eLife.
October 6, 2022

Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, together with a team of international collaborators, have discovered a previously unknown lineage of wild goats over ten millennia old. The research has just been published in the journal eLife.

The new goat type, discovered from genetic screening of bone remains and referred to as “the Taurasian tur”, likely survived the Last Glacial Maximum (the ice age), which stranded their ancestors in the high peaks of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey where their remains were found.
A chance discovery at Direkli Cave
Over 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey relied heavily on local game for food and subsistence. Located near the present-day village of Döngel and at an elevation of ~1,100 m above sea level, Direkli Cave was used for roughly three millennia (~14,000-11,000 years ago) as a seasonal camp for these hunters and may have been inhabited year-round.
“Among the artifacts found at Direkli Cave were large amounts of bone remains with distinct processing marks, indicating that wild goats were butchered there for consumption,” says Dr. Kevin Daly, from Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, who is first author of the research article.
“With the cave surrounded by high peaks, reaching ~2,200 m, the wild goat or bezoar ibex (Capra aegagrus) that inhabit the region today were likely the target of these Late Pleistocene hunters.”
During genetic screening of goat bone remains from Direkli, the geneticists noticed something unusual: many of the goats carried mitochondrial genomes similar to a different species of wild goat.

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