Abstract
In contrast to the abundant fossil record of arctic ground squirrels, Urocitellus parryii, from eastern Beringia, only a limited number of fossils is known from its western part. In 1946, unnamed GULAG prisoners discovered a nest with three mummified carcasses of arctic ground squirrels in the permafrost sediments of the El’ga river, Yakutia, Russia, that were later attributed to a new species, Citellus (Urocitellus) glacialis Vinogr. To verify this assignment and to explore phylogenetic relationships between ancient and present-day arctic ground squirrels, we performed 14C dating and ancient DNA analyses of one of the El’ga mummies and four contemporaneous fossils from Duvanny Yar, northeastern Yakutia. Phylogenetic reconstructions, based on complete cytochrome b gene sequences of five Late Pleistocene arctic ground squirrels and those of modern U. parryii from 21 locations across western Beringia, provided no support for earlier proposals that ancient arctic ground squirrels from Siberia constitute a distinct species. In fact, we observed genetic continuity of the glacialis mitochondrial DNA lineage in modern U. parryii of the Kamchatka peninsula. When viewed in a broader geographic perspective, our findings provide new insights into the genetic history of U. parryii in Late Pleistocene Beringia.
Highlights
Readers of “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr I
There is abundant and long-standing fossil evidence of arctic ground squirrels in northwestern North America[22], with much of the prehistoric range associated with the mammoth-steppe ecosystem[23,24], only few fossils are known from northeastern Asia[25]
A direct 14C age of 29,450 ± 925 uncal. years BP was determined by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) on a liver sample of U. glacialis (Gla[1], RTK 6386) (Fig. 3 and Supplementary Information)
Summary
Previous DNA-based studies argued that the genetic structure of modern arctic ground squirrels resulted from in-situ (i.e. eastern Beringia) diversification in the Late Pleistocene[11,12] These studies, largely limited to northwestern North America samples, have shown that two of the four major mtDNA lineages identified so far (Ber. and SW) are present on both sides of the Bering Strait[12]. In order to verify this hypothesis, further DNA studies based on a larger number of fossils from western and eastern Beringia, sampled if available at critical time-points as determined here, would be needed
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