Tracking Human Migration on a Micro Scale

By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog We have featured several episodes about the Iceman, Ötzi who lived 5300 years ago, but whose remains were found by hikers in the Italian Alps in 1991. Studies of his mummified remains have revealed much about his life during the Copper Age, between 3500 and 2300 BCE. Now we report not on Ötzi himself, but on his stomach bacteria, which tells us about his life and the history of human geography. Heliobacter pylori or H. pylori found in Ötzi's stomach infects two thirds of the world's population. This bacterium is thought to have become associated with humans at least 100,000 years ago. As humans spread to different locations around the world, and often formed isolated communities, different strains of H. pylori arose. By analyzing the genetic information of these bacteria in different human populations, scientists gain insight into how these ancient humans might have traveled and intermingled. These bacteria are only passed between people through intimate contact therefore its distribution is limited to the isolated population. So looking at the genome of Ötzi's H. Pylori, we can get an idea of the people he had interacted with. It was a difficult task to separate out the genetic information from a single type of bacteria among all the genetic information in the Iceman's body. Scientists managed to pull out his H. pylori DNA bit by bit and compared its sequences to those of modern strains. The modern European H. pylori...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news