Invisible eland identified from 60,000-year-old ochre-rich sediment

Fukuoka, Japan—Publishing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B a research team from Kyushu University, Universitetet i Bergen, and the University of Copenhagen reports that they found traces of ancient collagen protein from the common eland, Taurotragus oryx, on a 60,000-year-old ochre-rich surface in the Kilpdrift Complex, a Middle and Later Stone Age archeological site located within the coastal cliffs of the De Hoop Nature Reserve in South Africa.

To better understand how ochre was used by early humans, the team used palaeoproteomics, the high-throughput analyses of ancient proteins, to search for potential proteinaceous traces within this archaeological feature. The study identified collagen from elands in the ochre surface, suggesting that either animal-derived materials were deliberately mixed with the ochre or ochre-treated eland hides were present at the site.

These findings provide new evidence for the complex technical and possibly symbolic behaviors of early Homo sapiens.

The most significant finding is the identification of type I collagen proteins from the common eland, which provides biomolecular evidence that animal-derived materials were associated with ochre use during the Middle Stone Age. Until now, evidence of organic components mixed with ochre has been extremely rare, especially in Africa. This discovery offers a new way to investigate how early humans used ochre and other organic materials in their daily, technical, and potentially symbolic activities.

The team analyzed archived sediment samples taken from the Kilpdrif Complex using palaeoproteomics, a growing field of archaeology and paleontology that examines ancient proteins preserved in materials collected at archeological sites. The proteins were extracted from the sediments and analyzed using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The resulting protein fragments were then compared to large protein databases and a custom collagen reference database to identify their species of origin.

These findings demonstrate that palaeoproteomics can successfully recover and identify ancient proteins from archaeological sediments, even in challenging African environments where ancient DNA rarely survives. This creates a powerful new tool for archaeologists studying early human behavior, allowing them to investigate biological materials no longer visible in the archaeological record.

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For more information about this research, see "Palaeoproteomic investigation of archaeological sediments associated with ochre use in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa," Zahra Haghighi, Takumi Tsutaya, Elizabeth Catherine Velliky, Simon James Armitage, Christopher Miller, Meaghan Mackie, Francesco d'Errico, Gaudry Troché, Jesper Velgaard Olsen, Karen L. van Niekerk, Christopher Stuart Henshilwood, Enrico Cappellini. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.3300