Uluburun shipwreck stowaway house mouse: molar shape analysis and indirect clues about the vessel’s last journey T. Cucchi a, b, * a Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom b CNRS-Muse´um National d’Histoire Naturelle, De´partement E ´ cologie et Gestion de la Biodiversite´, UMR 5197, «Arche´oozoologie, histoire des socie´te ´s humaines et des peuplements animaux», Ba ˆtiment d’Anatomie compare ´e, 55 rue Buffon, 75005 Paris, France article info Article history: Received 8 October 2007 Received in revised form 9 May 2008 Accepted 6 June 2008 Keywords: Zooarchaeology Maritime Trade Invasive species Geometric morphometric Elliptic Fourier Transform abstract Human translocation by stowaway transport is the widely accepted vector of the current worldwide distribution of commensal rodents but its historical process has never been directly evidenced. The anecdotal find of the small murine (mice and rats) mandible among the wealthy cargo of the Uluburun shipwreck provide us with an unexpected opportunity to directly evidence the species associated with this stowaway and provide indirect clues regarding the ship’s route. Taxonomic identification and geo- graphic sourcing has been performed using outline molar shape analysis by Elliptic Fourier Transform comparing the Uluburun mouse molar phenotype with extant populations from eastern Mediterranean sibling species. Results showed that the mandible belonged to the house mouse (Mus musculus domes- ticus) with significant phenotypic similarities with extant Syrian house mouse populations. These results provide the earliest direct evidence for stowaway transports highlighting the historical process of the house mouse invasion of the Mediterranean. Using modern behavioural comparisons, combined with archaeological and historical sources, it has been argued that the servicing port of Ugarit (Minet el Beida) was a likely step on the vessel’s last journey. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Human translocation of rodents has been evidenced in the Near Oceania as far as the Late Pleistocene (Flannery, 1995; White, 2000, 2004), demonstrating an early role of human agency over the dis- tribution of mammalian species. The most ubiquitous of the com- mensal rodents is the house mouse and the widely accepted cause of its worldwide distribution is its stowaway transport within infested grain and foodstuffs cargo (Auffray et al., 1990a; Boursot et al., 1996; Navajas y Navarro and Britton-Davidian, 1989; Pocock et al., 2005), although the data to support this assertion are sparse (Suzuki, 1980; Baker, 1994). The historical process of its biological invasion in the Mediterranean is now well documented thanks to the diachronic mapping of zooarchaeological occurrences showing an invasive mechanism intimately linked with the evolution of maritime trade and exchange (Cucchi and Vigne, 2006; Cucchi et al., 2005). Its first human translocation happened as a by-product of the Neolithic colonization of Cyprus (Cucchi et al., 2002), evi- dencing indirectly a deep-sea Neolithic navigation covering 10,000 years (Cucchi, 2005; Vigne and Cucchi, 2005). Bronze Age maritime trade linking eastern Mediterranean cities and empires was then the main vector of its spread in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, its adaptation to the western Mediterranean commensal niche had been successful only once the migrant flow of mice by passive transport was impulsed by the commercial and demographic maritime expansions of the last millennium BC (Cucchi et al., 2005). Although this historical process relies on the assumption that stowaway transport was the dispersal vector in Mediterranean, no direct archaeological evidence was available to support it. The only direct archaeological evidence of stowaway transport is the skull of a brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) found in the shipwreck of an XVIIIth century French galleon that sank off the Corsican shores. This discovery could directly highlight the association between the brown rat invasion and the history of modern navigation (Vigne, 1995). Systematic sieving of sediments from the Late Bronze Age Ulu- burun shipwreck produced a single small murine (mice) mandible of a little more than 1 cm. This seemingly incidental find among the vast royal cargo of this impressive vessel provides us with a unique opportunity to examine the role of stowaway transports in the biological invasion of commensal rodents in light of Mediterranean Bronze Age trading networks. 2D geometric morphometric analysis of the in situ first lower molar from the mandible is utilized to identify the species involved in stowaway transport and localise a potential geographical source relying on intraspecific geographical variation of molar phenotype. * Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom. Tel.: þ44 191 334 1162. E-mail address: thomas.cucchi@durham.ac.uk Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas 0305-4403/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.06.016 Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008) 2953–2959