Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2019 Feb 7;14(2):e0211119. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211119. eCollection 2019.
Identifying the presence of animals based on faecal deposits in modern and ancient environments is of primary importance to archaeologists, ecologists, forensic scientists, and watershed managers, but it has proven difficult to distinguish faecal material to the species level. Until now, four 5β-stanols have been deployed as faecal biomarkers to distinguish between omnivores and herbivores, but they cannot distinguish between species. Here we present a database of faecal signatures from ten omnivore and herbivore species based on eleven 5β-stanol compounds, which enables us to distinguish for the first time the faecal signatures of a wide range of animals. We validated this fingerprinting method by testing it on modern and ancient soil samples containing known faecal inputs and successfully distinguished the signatures of different omnivores and herbivores.
基于现代和古代环境中的粪便沉积物来识别动物的存在对考古学家、生态学家、法医学家和流域管理者来说至关重要，但要将粪便物质区分到物种水平一直很困难。直到现在，已有四种 5β-甾醇被用作粪便生物标志物来区分杂食动物和草食动物，但它们无法区分物种。在这里，我们基于 11 种 5β-甾醇化合物，展示了一个来自 10 种杂食动物和草食动物的粪便特征数据库，这使我们首次能够区分广泛动物的粪便特征。我们通过在含有已知粪便输入的现代和古代土壤样本上测试这种指纹识别方法来验证这种方法，并成功区分了不同杂食动物和草食动物的特征。
