Ancient oral biome points to overall health
Images of skulls from Japanese museum collections. Top row shows two individual with blackened teeth. Bottom row shows individuals who did not have blackened teeth.
Image: Ken-ichi Shinoda, National Museum of Nature and Science, Tsukuba, Japan
Ancient oral biome points to overall health
A ndrea Elyse Messer
March 25, 2021
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. When a baby puts something from the floor in their mouth, we panic, but the mouth already contains thousands of bacteria. Now a team of researchers is looking at archaeological remains for an example of how Japanese oral biomes have changed and what they say about the people who owned those mouths and teeth.
Left side European bison / right side American bison.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wenceslaus, 911-935, left bison alone. Successors alternately hunted & protected them.
BIALOWIEZA FOREST, Poland––European wood bison, also called wisent, at risk of extinction for far longer than their North American cousins, are no longer “vulnerable,” and have accordingly been removed from the “Red List” maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
The century-long recovery of European wood bison from one small Polish herd demonstrates that large land-dwelling wildlife with huge habitat needs can co-exist with humans, where humans are willing to make room for them, even in regions from which the species have been extirpated centuries and even millennia before.