Fossilized dental plaque from archaic humans is revealing extinct bacteria that could lead to the development of new medicine.
Strange bacteria trapped in Neanderthals' teeth may one day help researchers develop novel antibiotics, according to a study published May 4 in the journal Science , which used dental plaque from ancient and modern humans to investigate the evolution of mouth microbes.
With just a few milligrams of dental calculus, Warinner can isolate billions of short DNA fragments from hundreds of species all scrambled together, then put those fragments back together to identify known species. And studying ancient remains puts up an additional hurdle: DNA found in the dental calculus of past humans may be from microbes that have gone extinct.
These Chlorobium species were almost entirely absent from the tartar in people who lived in the past 10,000 years. Between the Upper Pleistocene and the Holocene , over a span of about 100,000 years, humans have lived in caves, domesticated animals and invented 21st century plastics — all of which have their own distinct bacterial colonies. Changes in Chlorobium frequency appear to parallel our ancestors' changes in lifestyle.
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