Response to Tabin et al “Concerns about ancient DNA sequences reported from a Late Pleistocene individual from Southeast Asia”

This paper is a rebuttal to Tabin et al’s concerns about the reliability of mitochondrial DNA sequences from the MZR Late Pleistocene individual, which Tabin et al attributed to high error rates and abnormal error content. The authors argue that warm, acidic environmental conditions and the limitations of the cranium fossil material make elevated ancient DNA damage and possible artefacts from extraction, library construction, and sequencing plausible explanations for the observed error patterns rather than modern DNA contamination. They state that the mtDNA mutation motif for MZR, assessed via careful manual checking, should be reliable, and they add analyses describing how they minimized the impact of aDNA damage in population analyses. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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