期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2021
卷号：118
期号：32
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2102116118
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
The oral microbial community living in symbiosis with humans is a rich and diverse driver of health and disease that is strongly influenced by our ecology and lifestyle. However, its evolution across human prehistory remains elusive. By analyzing the DNA entrapped in archaeological dental calculus, we characterize the oral microbiomes of 44 prehistoric foragers and farmers from Southern Europe. We demonstrate that the genome of an oral bacteria diversified geographically and recorded one of the most dramatic changes in our biological and cultural history, the spread of farming. The transition to agriculture did not alter significantly the oral microbiome of ancient humans, whereas more significant changes occurred later in history, including the development of peculiar antibiotic resistance pathways.
Archaeological dental calculus, or mineralized plaque, is a key tool to track the evolution of oral microbiota across time in response to processes that impacted our culture and biology, such as the rise of farming during the Neolithic. However, the extent to which the human oral flora changed from prehistory until present has remained elusive due to the scarcity of data on the microbiomes of prehistoric humans. Here, we present our reconstruction of oral microbiomes via shotgun metagenomics of dental calculus in 44 ancient foragers and farmers from two regions playing a pivotal role in the spread of farming across Europe—the Balkans and the Italian Peninsula. We show that the introduction of farming in Southern Europe did not alter significantly the oral microbiomes of local forager groups, and it was in particular associated with a higher abundance of the species
Olsenella sp. oral taxon 807. The human oral environment in prehistory was dominated by a microbial species, Anaerolineaceae bacterium oral taxon 439, that diversified geographically. A Near Eastern lineage of this bacterial commensal dispersed with Neolithic farmers and replaced the variant present in the local foragers. Our findings also illustrate that major taxonomic shifts in human oral microbiome composition occurred after the Neolithic and that the functional profile of modern humans evolved in recent times to develop peculiar mechanisms of antibiotic resistance that were previously absent.
关键词：enancient DNA;dental calculus;metagenomics;Southern Europe
