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A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.

Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.

The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties. The findings are in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Visiting Fais Island

Studies have shown that targeting fast-moving marine predators like sharks and tunas, also known as pelagic fishing, played an important role in how early inhabitants of the Pacific Islands survived and developed their cultures.

Fais, a small raised coral island in the Yap State of Micronesia, has become an area of archaeological interest. Several expeditions to the island led to the discovery of the Powa archaeological site on its southern coast.

By examining the clues left behind in layers of soil beneath the surface, scientists found that Fais had been inhabited for nearly 1,800 years. The islanders relied heavily on pelagic fishing because navigating the surrounding coral reefs to catch inshore fish was quite tricky.

However, when researchers analyzed the fish remains to identify shark and tuna species, traditional bone-comparison methods fell short. These techniques made it difficult to identify the fish beyond the family level, and distinguishing marks faded over time due to poor preservation conditions in the soil. Also, many of these fish have cartilage in their skeleton, which does not fossilize.

The researchers in this study provided a more reliable, chemistry-dependent method for distinguishing the fish.

Collagen peptide mass fingerprinting

This study used ZooMS, a collagen fingerprinting technique, to achieve far more accurate results. The samples collected were processed using the acid-soluble collagen method, in which bones were first dissolved in acid, which digested the collagen into peptides. A few of the bone samples were rubbed with abrasive polish paper rather than dissolved in acid to extract the collagen.

The extracted materials were then analyzed by mass spectrometry to produce unique collagen "fingerprints" that were compared with modern reference samples.

The method identified 97% of tuna family bones with high confidence. Of the 77 samples of such fish, 75 were skipjack tuna, and the remaining two were yellowfin tuna and wahoo.

The shark remains showed more variety. Although the reference database was incomplete for precise identification, out of the 50 samples successfully fingerprinted, 20 were closely related to the silky shark, 11 to the Galapagos shark, 17 to the silvertip shark, and one to the whitetip reef shark.

The researchers note that these findings improve the accuracy of identifying ancient fish remains, giving us clearer insights into historical fishing practices. They called for further studies to expand reference databases, thereby enhancing the potential of ZooMS.

Molecular-level techniques can fill remaining gaps in species identification and improve our understanding of how fishing habits shaped societies.

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