Bioarchaeological evidence for commensal brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) in early Neolithic China
Cucchi, T.; Hulme-Beaman, A.; Orton, D.; Peng, L.; Li, Z.; Yuan, J.
Show abstract
Due to its commensal relationship with humans, facilitating its dispersal from its natural range in East Asia, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) is now one of the most cosmopolitan and invasive mammals. Brown rats are also vectors of human pathogens and the most commonly used mammalian model (after mice) for biomedical research. Despite their major role in biodiversity loss and medicine, our understanding of a likely origin for their commensal relationship with humans in China still relies on modern population genetics, without a reliable timeframe of localisation. In this research, we have tried to fill this gap using direct information from the archaeological remains of rats collected by Chinese colleagues in several archaeological sites dated between 9000 and 3500 BP. Thanks to high-resolution morphometrics and direct 14C dating, we have identified the occurrence of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) within the domestic area deposits of the early Neolithic site of Jiahu by 7500 cal BP, suggesting a tentative link between rice agriculture and an early commensal behaviour of this species.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Meaning-making behavior in a small-brained hominin, Homo naledi, from the late Pleistocene: contexts and evolutionary implications 93%
- Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture 93%
- Ancient DNA reveals the lost domestication history of South American camelids in Northern Chile and across the Andes 93%
Similar papers in this journal
- Femora Nutrient Foramina and Aerobic Capacity in Giant Extinct Xenarthrans 93%
- Shedding light on the Ophel biome: The Trans-Tethyan phylogeography of the sulfide shrimp Tethysbaena (Peracarida: Thermosbaenacea) in the Levant 93%
- Relict groups of spiny frogs indicate Late Paleogene-Early Neogene trans-Tibet dispersal of thermophile faunal elements 93%
Similar papers in this journal
- Characterizing the body morphology of the first metacarpal in the Homininae using 3D geometric morphometrics 93%
- Hair phenotype diversity across Indriidae lemurs 90%
- Potential evolutionary body size reduction in a Malagasy primate (Propithecus verreauxi) in response to human size-selective hunting pressure 89%
Similar papers in this journal
- How smart was T. rex? Testing claims of exceptional cognition in dinosaurs and the application of neuron count estimates in palaeontological research 92%
- Vascular microforamina and endocranial surface: normal variation and distribution in adult humans 91%
- The lower jaw of Devonian ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii): anatomy, relationships, and functional morphology 90%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.