The Baltic grey seal: A 9000-year history of presence and absence
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The grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) has been part of the Baltic Sea fauna for more than 9000 years and has ever since been subjected to extensive human hunting, particularly during the early phases of its presence in the Baltic Sea, but also in the early 20th century. In order to study their temporal genetic structure and to investigate whether there has been a genetically continuous grey seal population in the Baltic, we generated mitochondrial control region data from skeletal remains from ancient grey seals from the archaeological sites Stora Förvar (Sweden) and Neustadt (Germany) and compared these with modern grey seal data. We found that the majority of the Mesolithic grey seals represent haplotypes that is not found in contemporary grey seals, indicating that the Baltic Sea population went extinct, likely due to human overexploitation and environmental change. We hypothesize that grey seals recolonised the Baltic Sea from the North Sea. during the Bronze Age or Iron Age, and that the contemporary Baltic grey seal population is direct descendants of this recolonisation. Our study highlights the power of biomolecular archaeology to understand the factors that shape contemporary marine diversity.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Tidsskrift | Holocene |
| Vol/bind | 32 |
| Udgave nummer | 6 |
| Sider (fra-til) | 569-577 |
| Antal sider | 9 |
| ISSN | 0959-6836 |
| DOI | |
| Status | Udgivet - 2022 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
The skeletal material in this study has been provided by the museum collections at the Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, Sweden and the Archaeological State Museum Schloss-Gottorf, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. We would like to thank Jan Stor?, Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University for the osteological analysis of the Stora F?rvar material. We would also like to thank SNIC and Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX) for resources provided for the projects delivery02388, delivery00942. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Union?s EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under Marie Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 676154 as part of ?ArchSci2020?; and the Swedish Research Council, Sweden [grant number 2015-02151].
Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Union’s EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under Marie Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 676154 as part of ‘ArchSci2020’; and the Swedish Research Council, Sweden [grant number 2015-02151].
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
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