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

2025/05/29 by Palesa P. Madupe, Claire Koenig, Ioannis Patramanis +35 · 1 voice · 19 citations
Arts and Humanities · Dentistry · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Biology #Dentistry #Enamel paint #Evolutionary biology #Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies #Gene #Genetic variation #Genetics #Genotype #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Polymorphism (computer science) #Sexual dimorphism #Wildlife Ecology and Conservation #Zoology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.adt9539

published in Science 388(6750), 969-973 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)

openalex publication_date 2025/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/05/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

Paranthropus robustus is a morphologically well-documented Early Pleistocene hominin species from southern Africa with no genetic evidence reported so far. In this work, we describe the mass spectrometric sequencing of enamel peptides from four ~2 million–year-old dental specimens attributed morphologically to P. robustus from the site of Swartkrans in South Africa. The identification of AMELY-specific peptides enabled us to assign two specimens to male individuals, whereas semiquantitative mass spectrometric data analysis attributed the other two to females. A single amino acid polymorphism and the enamel-dentine junction shape variation indicated potential subgroups present within southern African Paranthropus . This study demonstrates how palaeoproteomics can help distinguish sexual dimorphism from other sources of variation in African Early Pleistocene hominins.

Citations

• Moving beyond the adaptationist paradigm for human evolution, and why it matters
• The evolutionary relationships and age of Homo naledi: An assessment using dated Bayesian phylogenetic methods

Cited by

• Assessing the Potential of Ancient Protein Sequences in the Study of Hominid Evolution
• Sex assessment in a hominin upper second molar (RV’23-350) from the Ruidera (Spain) Middle Pleistocene paleoanthropological site: a proteome-based analysis of the amelogenin
• The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual
• Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers
• A library of avian proteins improves palaeoproteomic taxonomic identification and reveals widespread intraspecies variability. [europepmc]
• How wear, age, and sex relate to enamel chipping in Cayo Santiago rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). [europepmc]
• Identification and removal of contamination in palaeoproteomic analysis of dental enamel. [europepmc]
• Assessing the Potential of Ancient Protein Sequences in the Study of Hominid Evolution. [europepmc]
• Assessing the potential of ancient protein sequences in the study of hominid evolution [europepmc]
• Archaeological preservation of amelogenesis pathways [europepmc]

Discussions

• Hello, Our paper on enamel proteins from Paranthropus robustus has finally been peer reviewed, please have a read here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Paranthropus robustus has been puzzling scien [bsky, 79 points, 3 comments]

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