​During the Middle and Upper Pleistocene, several thousands to ten thousand years ago, the steppe bison (Bison priscus) was a widely distributed Holarctic species, being present from England to America and from Spain and France to Russia. This large animal strongly impressed the first modern Europeans, who portrayed it in Paleolithic painted caves like the Chauvet and the Trois-Frères cave in France, or the Altamira cave in Spain. However, despite the abundance of bone remains and the symbolic value of this animal, only a tiny part (5%) of its mitochondrial genome had been characterized up to know.
The researchers were able to establish the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a steppe bison specimen from a 19,000-year-old bone fragment collected in the Trois-Frères cave (Ariège, France).

Painted and engraved bison from the Magdalenian Trois-Frères Cave

The bone sample was selected in collaboration with the Louis Bégouën Association and the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Midi-Pyrénées. Phylogenetic analyses enable to position the genome of this specimen in the bovid evolutionary tree and demonstrate its genetic proximity to the extant American bison (Bison bison). The mitochondrial genome sequences of the extinct steppe bison and the American bison only differ by a hundred nucleotides for a total of 16,300. This study provides a reference sequence that will be useful to analyze the genome of other extinct Ice Age bison species. The same group previously deciphered the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the extinct cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) from a 32,000-year-old bone sample collected in the Chauvet cave (Ardèche, France).