Domestication of South American Camelids: new Archaeological investigations
Résumé
Archaeological evidence suggests that South American Camelids (SAC), llamas (Lama glama) and alpacas (Vicugna pacos), were domesticated from potential wild ancestors, guanacos (Lama guanicoe) and vicunas (Vicugna vicugna), around 6000 years ago in the Andes. However, their domestication process is still poorly understood with two competing hypotheses. The first consider that both Llamas and Alpacas have been domesticated from guanacos while the second consider that llamas derived from guanacos and alpacas from vicunas.
We first investigated how much tooth morphology could contribute to identify the taxonomic diversity of SAC using 2D Geometric morphometrics (GMM) of teeth. This approach proved unable to distinguish current wild and domestic taxa. However, we found a great divergence between the archaeological and modern variation of SAC, suggesting that the camelids Pre-Hispanic diversity could not be explored using modern SAC as comparatives.
To bring new insights into the SAC domestication process, my PhD research project will focus on the unique site of Telarmachay (Peru) where evidence of a domestication process, 2000 years before the rest of Andean area, has been proposed. We will use a multidisciplinary approach combining 3D geometrics morphometrics on post-cranial bones and isotopic geochemistry analyses to unrevealing the domestication process.