AutoZooMS: Integrating robotics into high-throughput ZooMS for the species identification of palaeontological remains at Grotte Mandrin, France

Abstract

As the vast majority of excavated palaeontological skeletal remains are fragmentary to the extent that they cannot be identified by morphological analysis alone, various molecular methods have been considered to retrieve information from an otherwise underutilised resource. The introduction of collagen fingerprinting, known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), has become one of the most popular approaches to improve taxonomic data yields from fragmentary bone. However, manual laboratory work remains a barrier to the analysis of larger sample numbers. Here we test the incorporation of liquid-handling robots to further develop ZooMS into a more automated technique using samples excavated from Grotte Mandrin, France. By increasing the faunal identifications of the morphological indeterminable remains at layer B2 (~ 42–44 Ka), from 55 to 1215 (1026 of which were processed via AutoZooMS), we identified a wider range of taxa, now including Ursidae and Mammuthus, as well as further hominin remains. AutoZooMS has the capacity to investigate larger proportions of palaeontological assemblages rapidly and cost effectively whilst requiring little human intervention, aiming to improve our understanding of the human past.