Twentieth-Century Paleoproteomics: Lessons from Venta Micena Fossils Torres De Pinedo, Jesús Manuel Borja, Concepción García Olivares, Enrique Fernando Fossil proteins ELISA Paleoproteomics; RIA Venta Micena site VM-0 VM-1960 Proteomics methods can identify amino acid sequences in fossil proteins, thus making it possible to determine the ascription or proximity of a fossil to other species. Before mass spectrometry was used to study fossil proteins, earlier studies used antibodies to recognize their sequences. Lowenstein and colleagues, at the University of San Francisco, pioneered the identification of fossil proteins with immunological methods. His group, together with Olivares’s group at the University of Granada, studied the immunological reactions of proteins from the controversial Orce skull fragment (VM-0), a 1.3-million-year-old fossil found at the Venta Micena site in Orce (Granada province, southern Spain) and initially assigned to a hominin. However, discrepancies regarding the morphological features of the internal face of the fossil raised doubts about this ascription. In this article, we review the immunological analysis of the proteins extracted from VM-0 and other Venta Micena fossils assigned to hominins and to other mammals, and explain how these methods helped to determine the species specificity of these fossils and resolve paleontological controversies. 2022-09-26T07:54:46Z 2022-09-26T07:54:46Z 2022-08-06 journal article Torres, J.M... [et al.]. Twentieth-Century Paleoproteomics: Lessons from Venta Micena Fossils. Biology 2022, 11, 1184. [https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11081184] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/76954 10.3390/biology11081184 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI