Editor’s note: In January, the nonprofit news organization ProPublica published a sweeping list of museums, universities and other institutions that still hold Native American remains, including bones and scalp bags.
Only an anthropologist would treasure millennia-old human feces found in dry caves.
Just ask Dr. Meradeth Snow, a University of Montana researcher and co-chair of UM’s Department of Anthropology. She is part of an international team, led by the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center, that used human “paleofeces” to discover that ancient people had far different microorganisms living in their guts than we do in modern times.
Snow said studying the gut microbes found in the ancient fecal material may offer clues to combat diseases like diabetes that afflict people living in today’s industrialized societies.
Dr. Meradeth Snow
Ancient people had far different microorganisms in their guts than modern humans
Only an anthropologist would treasure millennia-old human feces found in dry caves. Just ask Dr. Meradeth Snow, a University of Montana researcher and co-chair of UM s Department of Anthropology.
She is part of an international team, led by the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center, that used human paleofeces to discover that ancient people had far different microorganisms living in their guts than we do in modern times.
Snow said studying the gut microbes found in the ancient fecal material may offer clues to combat diseases like diabetes that afflict people living in today s industrialized societies.
Novel Bacterial DNA Detected in Ancient Coprolites
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS According to a
Science Magazine report, a team of researchers led by microbiologist Aleksandar Kostic of Harvard University analyzed eight coprolites recovered from three rock shelters in Mexico and the southwestern United States to look for traces of the ancient human microbiome. The feces ranged in age from 2,000 to 1,000 years old. First, tiny samples were rehydrated and strands of DNA were recovered by archaeologist Meradeth Snow of the University of Montana, Missoula. Marsha Wibowo of Harvard University then separated out the human intestinal DNA from that of bacteria in the surrounding soil by looking for DNA damaged by time and DNA sequences associated with mammalian guts in previous research. She also found unfamiliar DNA thought to have come from extinct bacteria. “In just these eight samples from a relatively confined geography and time period, we found 38 percent novel species,” Kosti