Abstract
The current range of the Asian elephant is fragmented and restricted to southern Asia. Its historical range was far wider and extended from Anatolia and the Levant to Central China. The fossil record from these peripheral populations is scant and we know little of their relationship to modern Asian elephants. To gain a first insight to the genetic affinity of an E. maximus population that once inhabited Turkey we sequenced ca. 570 bp mtDNA from four individuals dating to ~3500 cal. BP. We show that these elephants carried a rare haplotype previously only observed in one modern elephant from Thailand. These results clarify the taxonomic identity of specimens with indeterminate morphologies and show that this ancient population groups within extant genetic variation. By placing the age of the common ancestor of this haplotype in the interval 3.7–58.7 kya (mean = 23.5 kya) we show that range-wide connectivity occurred at some time or times since the start of MIS 3, ~57 kya, probably reflecting range and population expansion during a favourable climatic episode. The genetic data do not distinguish natural versus anthropogenic origin of the Near Eastern Bronze Age population, but together with archaeological and paleoclimatic data they allow the possibility of a natural westward expansion around that time.
Highlights
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus, L. 1758) is an endangered species whose current distribution extends from the Indian subcontinent to Borneo (Figure 1A)
Its range was far wider during the Pleistocene and early Holocene, extending from Anatolia and the Levant in the west, along a narrow land corridor by the southern Asian coastline, to the Indian subcontinent and as far eastward as southern and central China (Santiapillai and Jackson 1990, Sukumar 2011) (Figure 1A)
We successfully amplified and sequenced DNA from four specimens, yielding a success rate of ca. 44% (4/9), consistent with previously published data on ca. 120 bp mtDNA fragments sequenced from ancient pigs from Near East dating to approximately 3500 cal
Summary
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus, L. 1758) is an endangered species whose current distribution extends from the Indian subcontinent to Borneo (Figure 1A). 2. Methods We extracted DNA from nine elephantid teeth from Kahramanmaraş and sequenced 579 bp mitochondrial DNA, including 574 bp of the fragment analysed in Vidya, Sukumar and Melnick (2009), comprising the C-terminal of cyt-b, t-RNAThr, t-RNAPro and the hypervariable left
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