A mummified Pleistocene gray wolf pup

Meachen, Julie; Wooller, Matthew J.; Barst, Benjamin D.; Funck, Juliette; Crann, Carley; Heath, Jess; Cassatt-Johnstone, Molly; Shapiro, Beth; Hall, Elizabeth; Hewitson, Susan; Zazula, Grant D.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.011

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…However, dietary analysis of a mummified MIS 3 Beringian wolf indicated a diet with a significant proportion of aquatic resources (Meachen et al, 2020), possibly indicating wolves may have exploited resources that were less available to lions or brown bears in Beringia during MIS 3.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Lions and brown bears colonized North America in multiple synchronous waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge

et al. 2021

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The Bering Land Bridge connecting North America and Eurasia was periodically exposed and inundated by oscillating sea levels during the Pleistocene glacial cycles. This land connection allowed the intermittent dispersal of animals, including humans, between Western Beringia (far north-east Asia) and Eastern Beringia (north-west North America), changing the faunal community composition of both continents. The Pleistocene glacial cycles also had profound impacts on temperature, precipitation, and vegetation, impacting faunal community structure and demography. While these paleoenvironmental impacts have been studied in many large herbivores from Beringia (e.g., bison, mammoths, horses), the Pleistocene population dynamics of the diverse guild of carnivorans present in the region are less well understood, due to their lower abundances. In this study, we analyze mitochondrial genome data from ancient brown bears (Ursus arctos; n = 103) and lions (Panthera spp.; n = 39), two megafaunal carnivorans that dispersed into North America during the Pleistocene. Our results reveal striking synchronicity in the population dynamics of Beringian lions and brown bears, with multiple waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge coinciding with glacial periods of low sea levels, as well as synchronous local extinctions in Eastern Beringia during Marine Isotope Stage 3. The evolutionary histories of these two taxa underscore the crucial biogeographic role of the Bering Land Bridge in the distribution, turnover, and maintenance of megafaunal populations in North America.We would like to thank the following institutions for allowing access to specimens in their collections:

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Lions and brown bears colonized North America in multiple synchronous waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge

et al. 2021

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“…Several additional lines of evidence demonstrate that Indian and Tibetan wolves have a long history of endemism in southern Asia and support the hypothesis that southern regions of Asia have been important centres for grey wolf evolution (Aggarwal et al, 2003; Sharma et al, 2004). All grey wolf mitochondrial DNA samples, including ancient samples from throughout northern Eurasia and North America spanning the last >50,000 years, turned up no matrilines that were as ancestral as were modern Indian and Tibetan wolf matrilines (Ersmark et al, 2016; Leonard et al, 2007; Loog et al, 2020; Meachen et al, 2020). In fact, all ancient mitogenomes thus far examined cluster within the Holarctic clade.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ancient divergence of Indian and Tibetan wolves revealed by recombination‐aware phylogenomics

et al. 2021

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In North America and Eurasia, the most ancestral populations of species often occur in the southern portions of their ranges (Hewitt, 2000;Petit et al., 2003). These southern regions tend to be the most climatically stable and therefore served as refugia during the heights of ice-age glaciations. In contrast, northern regions were associated with dramatic climate changes, fueling an alternation of range expansions and range contractions or extinctions in many species (Hewitt, 2000;Hofreiter & Stewart, 2009). Populations that today are widespread across northern latitudes often trace their origins to relatively recent, late Pleistocene expansion events from

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“…Although wolves are highly mobile, genetic differentiation of subpopulations living in close proximity can occur owing to habitat features, prey specialization or other ecological and geographic interactions (Schweizer et al, 2016; Silva et al, 2018; Stronen et al, 2014). Notably, inferences based on stable isotope analysis of ancient Beringian wolves have suggested some level of individual specialization associated with local prey availability (Fox‐Dobbs et al, 2008; Leonard et al, 2007; Meachen et al, 2020). Therefore, fluctuations in prey availability and habitat heterogeneity could have triggered the observed decrease in N e through local extinctions and subsequent divergence between ancestral populations of RFE and NNA wolves within Beringia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This expansion led to the replacement of indigenous Pleistocene wolf populations (Loog et al, 2020). An alternative scenario for North America is that extant wolves on the continent descend from a pre‐LGM expansion out of Beringia followed by a post‐LGM northward expansion from a glacial refugium south of the Laurentide/Cordilleran ice sheet complex (Koblmüller et al, 2016; Meachen et al, 2020). Overall, mitochondrial signatures illustrate a complex phylogeographic history for extant North American and Eurasian populations and high genetic similarity between the wolves of Alaska and Eastern Russia (Ersmark et al, 2016; Koblmüller et al, 2016; Loog et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demography and evolutionary history of grey wolf populations around the Bering Strait

et al. 2022

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Glacial and interglacial periods throughout the Pleistocene have been substantial drivers of change in species distributions. Earlier analyses suggested that modern grey wolves (Canis lupus) trace their origin to a single Late Pleistocene Beringian population that expanded east and westwards, starting c. 25,000 years ago (ya). Here, we examined the demographic and phylogeographic histories of extant populations around the Bering Strait with wolves from two inland regions of the Russian Far East (RFE) and one coastal and two inland regions of North‐western North America (NNA), genotyped for 91,327 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Our results indicated that RFE and NNA wolves had a common ancestry until c. 34,400 ya, suggesting that these populations started to diverge before the previously proposed expansion out of Beringia. Coastal and inland NNA populations diverged c. 16,000 ya, concordant with the minimum proposed date for the ecological viability of the migration route along the Pacific Northwest coast. Demographic reconstructions for inland RFE and NNA populations reveal spatial and temporal synchrony, with large historical effective population sizes that declined throughout the Pleistocene, possibly reflecting the influence of broadscale climatic changes across continents. In contrast, coastal NNA wolves displayed a consistently lower effective population size than the inland populations. Differences between the demographic history of inland and coastal wolves may have been driven by multiple ecological factors, including historical gene flow patterns, natural landscape fragmentation, and more recent anthropogenic disturbance.

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A mummified Pleistocene gray wolf pup

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

Lions and brown bears colonized North America in multiple synchronous waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge

Lions and brown bears colonized North America in multiple synchronous waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge

Ancient divergence of Indian and Tibetan wolves revealed by recombination‐aware phylogenomics

Demography and evolutionary history of grey wolf populations around the Bering Strait

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