1,000-Year-Old Teeth Reveal Diet and Disease
The plaque on millennium-old teeth from a German cemetery contain the residue of pork, cabbage and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Christopher Intagliata reports
By Christopher Intagliata
SUBSCRIBE TO Science Quickly
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
I'm guessing you brush twice a day or aspire to. Our ancestors were a little less diligent. But that's a good thing for scientists. Because ancient, plaque-coated teeth are like time capsules, preserving early evidence of cavities or even plague DNA.
Now researchers have turned to thousand-year-old teeth from a convent cemetery outside Frankfurt, Germany. And they cleaned 'em, much like your dentist does.
"We used the same dental tools, and collected the calculus from the teeth." That's molecular anthropologist Christina Warinner of the University of Oklahoma. Inside that calculus—or plaque—she and her colleagues found tiny bits of pork, bread wheat and cabbage, identified by their DNA. Along with the bugs behind strep throat, bacterial meningitis and an oral strain of gonorrhea. And don't be too quick to judge. "Nearly all of us still have gonorrhea in our mouth." Their study is in the journal Nature Genetics. [Christina Warinner et al., Pathogens and host immunity in the ancient human oral cavity]
Some of those bugs were antibiotic resistant too. Because long before penicillin, some microbes produced natural antibiotics to attack rivals. "Your mouth is like a battlefield of bacteria." So chew on that.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism
Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.
When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.
Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber
