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Dirt, Dates And Dna:Osl And Radiocarbon Chronologies Of Perenially Frozen Sediments In Siberia, And Their Implications For Sedimentary Ancient Dna Studies, Lee Arnold, Richard Roberts, Ross Macphee, James Haile, Fiona Brock, Per Moller, Duane Froese, Alexei Tikhonov, Allan Chivas, M. Thomas Gilbert, Eske Willerslev

Richard G Roberts

The sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) technique offers a potentially invaluable means of investigating species evolution and extinction dynamics in high-latitude environments. An implicit assumption of the sedaDNA approach is that the extracted DNA is autochthonous with the host deposit and that it has not been physically transported from older source deposits or reworked within the sedimentary profile by postdepositional mixing. In this paper we investigate whether these fundamental conditions are upheld at seven perennially frozen wetland sites across the Taimyr Peninsula and coastal lowlands of north-central Siberia. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon (14C) dating are used to constrain the …