Genomic analysis of three medieval parchments from German monasteries

Abstract

Abstract In the last two decades there has been growing interest in the analysis of ancient DNA obtained from the parchment used in historic documents. The genetic insight that this data provides makes collections of historic documents an invaluable source for studying the development and spread of historical livestock populations. Additionally, the biological data may provide new information for the historical analysis that could be used to determine the provenance as well as the authenticity of these documents. In this study, we extracted DNA from three medieval parchments that were written in German monasteries in the twelfth century. The source animal of the parchments could be identified as cattle and we compared their genome sequences with those of modern populations that are part of the 1000 Bull Genomes Project. The three animals were found to carry mtDNA haplogroup T3 and show a closer genetic relationship to other historic animals than to modern breeds. We further identified 39 haplotypes and 132 SNPs variants, which are rare ( $$<0.1$$ < 0.1 ) or even non-existent in modern breeds. Finally, the genetic distances between the parchment samples show a putative association with the dates when the documents were written, indicating the usefulness of genetic analysis for provenance research.