About 50,000 years ago, a group of Neanderthals built a house and a bathroom–from what is now a rocky escarpment south of Valencia, Spain. In recent years, some of the paleo-poop, the oldest known of a human species, have been excavated and analyzed. Now, researchers have taken a look at the ecosystems that exist in the gut of those early hominins from a fecal deposit in the remains of a fire pit on the site.
More than 200 bacterial microorganisms were extracted from the ancient shit by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, microbiologists and anthropologists. The researchers found a striking degree of consistency between the microbial inhabitants of the Neanderthal and the kind of microbes that populate the intestines of modern humans. This consistency shows that many small inhabitants of our interior are actually long-term inhabitants who have lived in us for hundreds of thousands of years and developed along with the hominins that inhabit them. The research was published in the Nature journal Communications Biology.
According to Marco Candela, a microbiologist at the University of Bologna and co-author of the article, the team wanted to ‘see which microbiomes along with the Homo gender in evolutionary time. To do this, they looked for microbes that modern people can share with Neanderthals.
The early reconstruction of a human gut is useful in contextualizing what our microbiomes look like today; researchers want to know which bacteria stayed with us and which disappeared completely from our internal ecosystems. Microorganisms with a significant endurance in the intestines of mammals are called ‘old friends’. in the mid 2000s, and their co-evolution with us is linked to the way humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
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The oldest data from the human gut microbiome is about 8,000 years old – it does not even precede the last ice age, which ended about 11,000 years ago. This has failed researchers when it comes to the inside of our early ancestors. The Neanderthal shit moves the chronology back about 40,000 years – shortly before the Neanderthal people as we know it disappeared from the evolutionary record.
“The point is that we have identified some microorganisms that are shared between modern humans and Neanderthals,” Candela said. ‘This means that these microorganisms populated the intestines of the human race before the separation of the Neanderthal and sapiens gender lines. ”
An important finding in the Neanderthal shit was the inclusion of short-chain fatty acid-producing bacteria, many of which enable people to deplete extra energy from dietary fiber, and one of which, according to the researchers, has health benefits for elderly mothers and their children. But just as good microbes have invaded our intestines over time, so have the hell-raisers – researchers have also found bacterial pathogens in the feces that still occur today, causing oral and dental diseases in modern humans.
According to Candela, the microbiomes of populations living in traditional, rural ways, such as the Hazda, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, tend to be more similar. On the other hand, there are people who live in urban environments, who isolate our intestines and compare our bacterial inhabitants less from person to person. The article describes a great loss of bacterial diversity in modern human gut and the situation in which each of our gut does not talk to each other as in our evolutionary past. “Each of us is like an island,” Candela said.
Often the evolutionary path of man is heroically surrounded – from very early humans we were the ones who succeeded. But as the Neanderthal microbiome shows, we were hardly alone for that trip. Many microorganisms had the same path.
“Based on these results, we can expect the symbiotic time depth between humans and some attending microbes to last at least one million years,” wrote Stephanie Schnorr, co-author in Nature. blog about the research. “It implies a solid physiological relationship linked to normal development and health in longevity for people as well as Neanderthals as an ancient legacy.”
Hopefully more feces will be studied in the future so that we can further unpack the guts that made us who we are. For now, we can be thankful that the findings are not stupid.