About 50,000 years ago, a bunch of Neanderthals made their home – and a bathroom–from what is now a rocky escarpment south of Valencia, Spain. In recent years, some of these paleo-poops have been excavated and analyzed, the oldest known to come from a human species. Now, researchers have looked at the ecosystems that existed in the courage of those early hominins, from a fecal deposit to the remains of a fire pit on the site.
More than 200 bacterial microorganisms were extracted from ancient poop by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, microbiologists and anthropologists. Researchers have discovered a striking amount of consistency between the microbial residents of the Neanderthal gut and the kind of microbes that populate the courage of modern humans. This consistency shows that many of the tiny inhabitants within us are in fact long-term residents, who have lived in us for hundreds of thousands of years and have evolved with the hominins they inhabit. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Biology.
According to Marco Candela, a microbiologist at the University of Bologna and co-author of the paper, the team wanted to “see which microbiomes co-evolve with Man offspring during evolution. “To do this, they looked for microbes that contemporary humans could share with Neanderthals.
Having an early reconstruction of the human gut is useful in contextualizing the appearance of our microbiomes today; researchers want to know what bacteria are left in us and which have completely disappeared from our internal ecosystems. Microorganisms with a substantial power to stay in mammals’ courage have been called “old friends” in the mid – 2000s, and their co-evolution with us has been linked to the way humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
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The oldest data on intestinal microbiomes for humans is about 8,000 years old – not even preceding the last ice age, which ended about 11,000 years ago. This has left researchers in the lurch when it comes to understanding the insides of our early ancestors. The Neanderthal people push the chronology back about 40,000 years – shortly before Neanderthals, as we know them, disappear from the record of evolution.
“The idea is that we have identified some microorganisms that are shared between modern and Neanderthal humans,” Candela said. “This means that these microorganisms populate the gut of human offspring before the segregation of Neanderthals, and sapiens nations. ”
An important finding in Neanderthal poop was the inclusion of short-chain fatty acid-producing bacteria, many of which allow people to get extra energy from dietary fiber, and one that researchers suggest could have provided health benefits to older mothers and their children. But just as good microbes have hitchhiked in our courage over time, so have those who grew up in hell – researchers have found bacterial pathogens in the feces that remain around today, causing oral and dental disease in modern humans.
According to Candela, microbiomes of people living in traditional, rural ways, such as Hazda, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, tend to have a more similar audacity. On the other hand, there are people who live in urban areas, who isolate our courage and make our bacterial residents less similar from person to person. The paper describes a wholesale loss of bacterial diversity in the modern human gut and a situation in which each of our courage does not speak to each other as they did in our evolutionary past. “Each of us is like an island,” Candela said.
Often, the path of human evolution is heroically framed – among many people in the early years, ours was the one who succeeded. But, as the Neanderthal microbiome shows, we were hardly alone for that journey. A lot of microorganisms had the same path.
“Based on these results, we can anticipate the symbiotic depth between humans and some co-resident microbes to be at least a million years old,” co-author Stephanie Schnorr wrote in a blog on research. “This implies a fixed physiological relationship, which is related to the normal development and health of longevity in both humans and Neanderthals, as an ancient heritage.”
We hope that more feces will be studied in the future, so that we can unpack even more the courage that made us who we are. For now, we can be grateful that the results are not stupid.