Archaeological proteins from the Niah Caves Complex, Sarawak.

Valerie Wasinger£, Darren Curnoe§, Raynold Mendoza§, Ipoi Datan#, and Mohd. S. Sauffi#

§ School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia 2052. £ Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Facility, Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. # Sarawak Museum Department, Kuching, Malaysia.

The Niah Caves complex in Malaysia, Borneo, is one of the most iconic archaeological locations in Southeast Asia, and has yielded some of the oldest modern human remains in the region – most famously, the sometimes controversial ‘Deep Skull’. Though most noted for its antiquity, the caves complex has been periodically occupied right up until the 20th Century. The Niah West Mouth, home of the infamous ‘Hell Trench’ and oldest human remains, also houses a large number of Neolithic and Iron Age burials. The Painted Cave, only a few hundred metres away, has rock paintings and boat coffin burials dated to the Iron Age. Traders Cave, the site of new and ongoing excavations, still retains the 19th and 20th century wooden scaffolds of raised platforms used to sleep birds nest traders, some of whom still operate in the area to this day.

Though ancient DNA analysis has become an indispensable tool for archaeological research in much of the world, the warm and damp environments typical of Southeast Asia severely affect biomolecule preservation and largely render DNA in archaeological samples irretrievable. Proteins, on the other hand, have been demonstrated to survive for significantly longer periods of time, even in poor preservational conditions.

We have successfully extracted protein from a small amount of powder (mg) from archaeological human bone from the West Mouth dated to the Neolithic period (2000-4000 years old). We present the results of one of the first shotgun proteomic profiles of archaeological human bone, as well a consideration of the challenges and prospects for progression of the technique.