Abstract
Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) vertebrae from archaeological sites were used to study the history of the Icelandic Atlantic cod population in the time period of 1500-1990. Specifically, we used coalescence modelling to estimate population size and fluctuations from the sequence diversity at the cytochrome b (cytb) and Pantophysin I (PanI) loci. The models are consistent with an expanding population during the warm medieval period, large historical effective population size (NE), a marked bottleneck event at 1400-1500 and a decrease in NE in early modern times. The model results are corroborated by the reduction of haplotype and nucleotide variation over time and pairwise population distance as a significant portion of nucleotide variation partitioned across the 1550 time mark. The mean age of the historical fished stock is high in medieval times with a truncation in age in early modern times. The population size crash coincides with a period of known cooling in the North Atlantic, and we conclude that the collapse may be related to climate or climate-induced ecosystem change.