Hadza men prepare to hunt.IMAGE COURTESY OF JEFF LEACHFewer than 200 Hadza people live as hunter-gatherers near the shore of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. In a study published today (August 24) in Science, a team led by Justin Sonnenburg of Stanford University has shown that their gut microbiota composition cycles with the Tanzanian seasons. The authors also found a clear segregation in the make-up of the microbiome between non-industrialized and industrialized populations.
This result “gives us some evidence that there was a common type of microbiome that accompanied humans for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years as we spread around the planet,” says Sonnenburg. “What’s amazing is that the same species in the Hadza that show volatility over the seasons are the same ones that we have lost in the industrialized world. Something about fluctuations in the microbiome makes certain species vulnerable to loss for whatever reason, diet or otherwise.”
In order to better understand the microbiome of modern hunter-gatherers, Sonnenburg and colleagues collected 350 stool samples from 188 Hadza individuals across 12 months. The authors’ genomic analysis and data from a previous study revealed that the Hadza microbiomes are more diverse during Tanzania’s ...
