A piece of leather caught among stones in a wall built by 19th-century miners has turned out to hold a much older record: DNA from a goat that lived roughly 7,000 years ago.
Researchers studying the material from Cueva de los Murciélagos, near Albuñol in southern Spain, recovered enough genetic information to identify a female domestic goat and investigate its relationship to modern herds. Their study appeared in PLOS One on November 4.
The surviving material consists of two fragments thought to come from the same hide. One still measures about 35 centimeters long. Hair remains on one side; the other bears signs of leather processing. Four deliberately made holes offer another trace of the people who worked it.
Radiocarbon dating places the leather in the Early Neolithic, about 7,000 to 7,250 years ago. The cave was used for burials, and the researchers think the hide may have been clothing, a covering or another funerary object. Its precise purpose remains unknown.
The genetic payoff came from comparing its badly fragmented DNA with modern goats. The animal belonged to the domestic species, rather than the wild Iberian ibex. It also showed a strong genetic connection to European breeds, especially the Bermeya goat of northern Spain.
That suggests some ancestry links between prehistoric herds and goats alive today. It does not establish that the ancient animal was itself a Bermeya. The researchers also caution that their comparisons included only a small selection of modern Spanish breeds.
Human DNA and traces aligning with fox or other canid DNA survived too, potentially recording handling and later disturbance. Those traces cannot identify whoever wore or worked the leather.
The remarkable part is that any useful genetic record survived in this material at all. A fragile hide in a warm-region cave, later disturbed by mining, still preserved clues to an animal and the people who transformed its skin into something useful.
Source: Erven and colleagues, PLOS One, November 4, 2026.
The approximately 7,000-year-old goat leather from Cueva de los Murciélagos, with close-ups of worked edges and perforations. Credit: MUTERMUR Project, CC BY 4.0. Image source and credit; license. Image unchanged.
