Biology Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-23-2019
Publication Title
Scientific Reports
ISSN
2045-2322
Volume
9
First Page
19637
Abstract
Dental calculus, or mineralized plaque, represents a record of ancient biomolecules and food residues. Recently, ancient metagenomics made it possible to unlock the wealth of microbial and dietary information of dental calculus to reconstruct oral microbiomes and lifestyle of humans from the past. Although most studies have so far focused on ancient humans, dental calculus is known to form in a wide range of animals, potentially informing on how human-animal interactions changed the animals’ oral ecology. Here, we characterise the oral microbiome of six ancient Egyptian baboons held in captivity during the late Pharaonic era (9th–6th centuries BC) and of two historical baboons from a zoo via shotgun metagenomics. We demonstrate that these captive baboons possessed a distinctive oral microbiome when compared to ancient and modern humans, Neanderthals and a wild chimpanzee. These results may reflect the omnivorous dietary behaviour of baboons, even though health, food provisioning and other factors associated with human management, may have changed the baboons’ oral microbiome. We anticipate our study to be a starting point for more extensive studies on ancient animal oral microbiomes to examine the extent to which domestication and human management in the past affected the diet, health and lifestyle of target animals.
Additional Comments
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels (Belgium) and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche program #: ANR-11-LABX-0032-01 LabEx ARCHIMEDE; ERC grant #: 324249
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
NSUWorks Citation
Ottoni, Claudio; Meriam Guellil; Andrew T. Ozga; Anne C. Stone; Oliver Kersten; Barbara Bramanti; Stephanie Porcier; and Wim Van Neer. 2019. "Metagenomic Analysis of Dental Calculus in Ancient Egyptian Baboons." Scientific Reports 9, (): 19637. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56074-x.
ORCID ID
0000-0003-4540-7106
DOI
10.1038/s41598-019-56074-x
Comments
©The Author(s) 2019.
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