Reconstructing Oral Microbiomes of Ancient Individuals from Different Agricultural Intensification Systems
Research Poster Health & Life Sciences 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Christine Ta
Exhibition Number 217
Abstract
The Neolithic Transition (NT) shifted our subsistence strategies, moving from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture. As a result, humans adopted new carbohydrate-rich diets, resulting in a shift in the human microbiome. This shift is well described in the current literature on the European Neolithic transition; however, other regional agricultural systems in Asia and Mesoamerica remain unknown. Using shotgun metagenomics, we investigate how the oral microbial taxonomic diversity and function change across the adoption of farming in three different cultural-ecological contexts. We test if the observed changes in non-European agricultural systems reflect a similar trend reported in populations associated with the European (NT). We test if the observed changes in non-European agricultural systems reflect a similar trend reported in populations associated with the European neolithic transition. This study characterizes the microbial taxonomic profile (via MALTn) of the oral microbiomes reconstructed from dental calculus extracted from ancient individuals excavated in Shandong, China (n=17), Lima, Peru (n=11), and Tolna, Hungary (n= 11). We found that there are differences in compositional diversity of the oral microbiome between the three regions with culture and regions statistically significant in driving these differences. When controlling for regions, culture is found to not be statistically significant in Hungary and Peru’s cohort. The findings in this study lays the foundation to broaden our understanding and inquiry of how agricultural adaptation impacts the human biology in non-European contexts, which allows for equitable reconstruction of our species' evolutionary past and provides insights into modern microbiome variations observed between populations.
Importance
While researchers have observed graduals shift in the oral microbial diversity in a European context, would a similar trend be observed in other regions also undergoing adoption of carbohydrates? A global comparison between three unique regions will provide key information about changes in the oral microbiome over time in other regions undergoing integration of rich carbohydrate diets consequential to the adoption of farming. This project sets to enhance our understanding of the Neolithic Transition to better understand how human biology have been impacted and its connection to health, especially in terms of investigating antimicrobial resistance variation (AMR) as changing microbes would suggest alteration in microbial interaction (i.e. increased competition), which lends support to address the AMR health crisis.