Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus
- Palesa P. Madupe
- Claire Koenig
- Ioannis Patramanis
- Patrick L. Rüther
- Nomawethu Hlazo
- Meaghan Mackie
- Mirriam Tawane
- Johanna Krueger
- Alberto J. Taurozzi
- Gaudry Troché
- Job Kibii
- Robyn Pickering
- Marc R. Dickinson
- Yonatan Sahle
- Dipuo Kgotleng
- Charles Musiba
- Fredrick Manthi
- Liam Bell
- Michelle DuPlessis
- Catherine Gilbert
- Bernhard Zipfel
- Lukas F. K. Kuderna
- Esther Lizano
- Frido Welker
- Pelagia Kyriakidou
- Jürgen Cox
- Catherine Mollereau
- Caroline Tokarski
- Jonathan Blackburn
- Jazmín Ramos-Madrigal
- Tomas Marques-Bonet
- Kirsty Penkman
- Clément Zanolli
- Lauren Schroeder
- Fernando Racimo
- Jesper V. Olsen
- Rebecca R. Ackermann
- Enrico Cappellini
2025-05-29
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.