Insights from Neandertal dental calculus: tracking Pacific colonization events using ancient bacteria

Summary

Interpreting the evolutionary history of bacterial communities within the human body (microbiota) is key to understanding multiple aspects of disease transmission and human health. This tight association between humans and their microorganisms can also be exploited to track past human interactions, providing information on past human movements and their introductions to new locations or environments. Using a shotgun sequencing approach on ancient DNA from the dental calculus in Neandertals, ancient Europeans and Africans, and greater apes, we have shown that specific oral and respiratory bacterial and viral pathogens can be examined and disease origins can be determined using this method. By examining ancient and historic bacterial DNA from dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) of Pacific Islanders, we can now explore past human movements by tracking bacterial lineages in the mouth, and examine how pathogens and commensal microorganisms were impacted by changes in diet and environment. Consequently, dental calculus present on archaeological specimens from Pacific Islanders provides a wealth of cultural and anthropological information about the past, which is critical to identify the timing and impacts of cultural and environmental events that altered human health and history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Primer of the Ancient Mariner: New Perspectives on aDNA Research and the Prehistoric Colonization of Islands

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