Overview
- A Nature study by Carter et al. reports that hundreds of gut microbial species are shared between the Hadza of Tanzania and the Tsimane of Bolivia, two Indigenous groups with lifestyles less affected by industrialization.
- Genomic comparisons show strain-level differences between the same microbial species in the Hadza and Tsimane that match the timing expected from prehistoric human migrations out of Africa.
- Many of the species found in both Indigenous groups are now rare or missing in populations from industrialized regions, indicating a loss of ancestral gut microbes with modernization.
- The results support the idea that humans carried symbiotic microbes as they dispersed and that those microbes’ global patterns reflect human movement as well as recent lifestyle change.
- Beyond mapping microbiome history, the study raises practical concerns about health and conservation, since losing ancestral microbes could affect disease risk and suggests a need to catalogue and preserve microbial diversity.