A novel lineage of the Capra genus discovered in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey using ancient genomics

Abstract

Direkli Cave, located in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, was occupied by Late Epipaleolithic hunters-gatherers for the seasonal hunting and processing of game including large numbers of wild goats. We report genomic data from new and published Capra specimens from Direkli Cave and, supplemented with historic genomes from multiple Capra species, find a novel lineage best represented by a ~14,000 year old 2.59X genome sequenced from specimen Direkli4. This newly discovered Capra lineage is a sister clade to the Caucasian tur species (Capra cylindricornis and Capra caucasica), both now limited to the Caucasus region. We identify genomic regions introgressed in domestic goats with high affinity to Direkli4, and find that West Eurasian domestic goats in the past, but not those today, appear enriched for Direkli4specific alleles at a genome-wide level. This forgotten “Taurasian tur” likely survived Late Pleistocene climatic change in a Taurus Mountain refugia and its genomic fate is unknown. Keywords: Genomics, ancient DNA, Capra, Taurus Mountains bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.08.487619; this version posted August 5, 2022. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.