john hawks weblog  paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution
• Tracing teeth troubles with fossil bacteria      Sun,
2013-02-17 19:36 -- John Hawks      Ed Yong has a great account
today of some research from Alan Cooper's lab on the oral
microbiome in pre-agricultural and post-agricultural Europeans:
"Prehistoric Plaque and the Gentrification of Europe’s Mouth".
I'll have some more comments on this new research when I can sit
down to write them up. I've been waiting for this to come out
for quite a long time -- I first heard about the research almost
three years ago. The potential to characterize oral ecology
across time is immense, and we have some excellent data on
dental pathologies across the entire timespan. Caries and other
dental pathologies are very new in human populations, and
although starchy diets have been blamed, very little has been
known about how oral bacteria themselves may have become more
pathogenic over time. This study is really great because it
opens a new door to looking at