Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability within southern African Paranthropus

Abstract

The evolutionary relationships among extinct African hominin taxa are highly debated and largely unresolved, due in part to a lack of molecular data. Even within taxa, it is not always clear, based on morphology alone, whether ranges of variation are due to sexual dimorphism versus potentially undescribed taxonomic diversity. For Paranthropus robustus, a Pleistocene hominin found only in South Africa, both phylogenetic relationships to other taxa ^1,2 and the nature of intraspecific variation ^3–6 are still disputed. Here we report the mass spectrometric (MS) sequencing of enamel proteomes from four ca. 2 million year (Ma) old dental specimens attributed morphologically to P. robustus, from the site of Swartkrans. The identification of AMELY-specific peptides and semi-quantitative MS data analysis enabled us to determine the biological sex of all the specimens. Our combined molecular and morphometric data also provide compelling evidence of a significant degree of variation within southern African Paranthropus, as previously suggested based on morphology alone ⁶. Finally, the molecular data also confirm the taxonomic placement of Paranthropus within the hominin clade. This study demonstrates the feasibility of recovering informative Early Pleistocene hominin enamel proteins from Africa. Crucially, it also shows how the analysis of these proteins can contribute to understanding whether hominin morphological variation is due to sexual dimorphism or to taxonomic differences. We anticipate that this approach can be widely applied to geologically-comparable sites within South Africa, and possibly more broadly across the continent.