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| Honey is a typical food source for the Hadza during the wet season. Figure taken from http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/health/hunter-gatherer-diet-tanzania-the-conversation/index.html |
The Hadza are a group of hunter-gatherers from Tanzania. Their lifestyle cycles between foraging in the wet season to hunting in the dry season. This way of life has a marked effect on their diet and has produced a seasonal change in their gut microbes that have piqued the interest of scientists such as Smits and his team. The scientists collected fecal samples from 188 individuals over a 12-month span. The samples were genetically sequenced to identify what microbes live in their gut and how diverse they are. Studies showed that a more diverse microbial community emerged in the dry season compared to the wet season where some species could no longer be detected. The results were also compared to the gut microbes of people from different countries. An interesting finding was that the more urbanized populations had a lower diversity of microbes (a lot of which are missing compared to those found in the Hadza) and no cyclic tendencies of dormancy and emergence. Smits and his colleagues also found that Hadza microbes had a lower level of antibiotic resistance genes than the general population of civilized countries.
This leaves us with a series of interesting questions. What will happen to the Hadza gut microbes when introduced to modern medicine? Will they lose some microbes due to a change in diet or lifestyle? If so, what sorts of microbes have we lost as a side effect of modernization?
Citation: Smits SA, Leach J, Sonnenburg ED, Gonzalez CG, Lichtman JS, Reid G, et al. (2017). Seasonal cycling in the gut micobiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Science. 357: (802-806). doi: 10.1126/science.aan483
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