The mid-Pliocene was a global warm period, preceding the onset of Quaternary glaciations. Here we use cosmogenic nuclide dating to show that a fossiliferous terrestrial deposit that includes subfossil trees and the northern-most evidence of Pliocene ice wedge casts in Canada’s High Arctic (Ellesmere Island, Nunavut) was deposited during the mid-Pliocene warm period. The age estimates correspond to a general maximum in high latitude mean winter season insolation, consistent with the presence of a rich, boreal-type forest. Moreover, we report that these deposits have yielded the first evidence of a High Arctic camel, identified using collagen fingerprinting of a fragmentary fossil limb bone. Camels originated in North America and dispersed to Eurasia via the Bering Isthmus, an ephemeral land bridge linking Alaska and Russia. The results suggest that the evolutionary history of modern camels can be traced back to a lineage of giant camels that was well established in a forested Arctic.

RATIONALE: We report the use of proteomics techniques to study how the fossil bone proteome changes in complexity over one million years. METHODS: We include the attempted use of a previously unreported methodology in proteome research, to remove the dominant bone collagens using bacterial collagenase as well as conventional shotgun proteomics methodology following digestion with the protease trypsin. In this study we expand upon a set of 19 bovine sub‐fossil specimens ranging over one and a half million years that had previously been shown to possess collagen, using a total of 46 LTQ‐Orbitrap liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) analyses containing 462,186 precursor ion analyses. RESULTS: Although many types of proteins can typically be identified in recent bone, in degraded bone we observe a rapid loss of lower abundance proteins. Abundant serum proteins such as serum albumin and alpha‐2‐HS‐glycoprotein appear to be more easily recovered in ancient bone, both being identified in specimens dating to the Early Pleistocene, the earliest period tested in this study. Proteins belonging to the leucine‐rich repeat family such as lumican, biglycan and chondroadherin also survive well, possibly because of their interactions with bone collagen. CONCLUSIONS: Of these 'survivor proteins' A2HSG shows a remarkable amount of sequence variation, making it potentially one of the most useful proteins to study for species identification and phylogenetic inference in archaeological and palaeontological bone. © 2014 The Authors. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Determining the extent of overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, is fundamental to understanding the nature of their interactions and what led to the disappearance of archaic hominins. Apart from a possible sporadic pulse recorded in Greece during the Middle Pleistocene, the first settlements of modern humans in Europe have been constrained to ~45,000 to 43,000 years ago. Here, we report hominin fossils from Grotte Mandrin in France that reveal the earliest known presence of modern humans in Europe between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago. This early modern human incursion in the Rhône Valley is associated with technologies unknown in any industry of that age outside Africa or the Levant. Mandrin documents the first alternating occupation of Neanderthals and modern humans, with a modern human fossil and associated Neronian lithic industry found stratigraphically between layers containing Neanderthal remains associated with Mousterian industries.