Moeller and his colleagues are now examining gorilla fecal samples to find out where they stand as slightly more distant primate relatives to humans. "I don't think there's any reason to think one enterotype is going to have an effect on health that's going to be better" than the others. "Before we found this in chimpanzees, there was a possibility that enterotypes were a product of modernization, which could mean they have some negative effects on health," he said. The similarities between chimp and human colonies suggest enterotypes predate our species, which in turn suggests that none of the three ecosystems are better than the others, Moeller said. 8) These awesome apes are one of the few animals that use tools to help them get things done. No one has ever tested humans for changes over a period longer than two weeks, Moeller said, but the results suggest our enterotypes may shift over time, too. Some groups of chimps eat up to 200 different kinds of food, in fact. Seven of the chimps in the study were tested repeatedly over eight years, and their gut microbes were found to change from type to type over that time period. They are highly adaptable and can survive in both lowland and mountainous regions up to 6,000 feet above sea level. The earliest hominins lived in similar environments and had similar diets to those of fossil apes 67, 68, in both cases with low quantities of animal products being eaten, as in living chimpanzee populations 69 - 71: chimpanzees hunt and eat smaller animals, providing survival value during dry seasons when fruit is scarce 69 - 73. These behaviours include differences in tool use, aimed throwing, nest building, grooming, rain dances, and courtship. Or they could be ancient, shared among our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees are found primarily in tropical and sub-tropical climates of Africa, where they inhabit a variety of habitats ranging from rainforests to open woodlands. Jane Goodall’s long-term research on the chimpanzees of Gombe contributed to a comprehensive study that identified almost 40 different behaviour patterns in chimpanzees that are an indication of significant cultural variation. They could be distinctly human, he told LiveScience, which would suggest they arose relatively recently, perhaps in response to the development of agriculture. ![]() "No one really knows why these three enterotypes exist," said study researcher Andrew Moeller, a doctoral student at Yale University.Īlong with his adviser Howard Ochman and their colleagues, Moeller wants to understand how these enterotypes arose. Researchers dubbed these distinct bacterial ecosystems "enterotypes." ("Entero" means gut or intestine.) These types weren't linked to any personal characteristics such as geographic area, age or gender. In 2011, researchers learned that everyone's gut bacteria fall into one of three different types, almost analogous to blood types. Problems with microbe populations may also contribute to obesity and inflammatory bowel diseases. Human gut bacteria are crucial to health, with infants relying on healthy microbe populations to influence the developing immune system.
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