Here, we explore the possible ancient fungal species in the gut of Otzi, the Iceman, a
naturally mummified human found in the Tyrolean Alps (border between Italy and Austria) …

Our paper on the microbiota of Andean mummies gut contents (Santiago-Rodriguez et al.
2016) has recently raised some questions detailed by Eisenhofer, Cooper and Weyrich …

Background Ancient microbiota information represents an important resource to evaluate
bacterial evolution and to explore the biological spread of infectious diseases in history. The …

The study of ancient disease can now include direct analyses of all or part of the genomes of
pathogens through ancient DNA techniques. Such analyses are challenging since due to …

Molecular biology has made consid-erable contributions to the study of human history from
the earliest days of our species, when our ancestors began to walk on the savannah, to the …

Ancient hominoid genome studies can be regarded by definition as metagenomic analyses
since they represent a mixture of both hominoid and microbial sequences in an …

The development of next-generation sequencing has led to a breakthrough in the analysis of
ancient genomes, and the subsequent genomic analyses of the skeletal remains of ancient …

Ancient Egyptian remains have been of interest for anthropological research for decades.
Despite many investigations, the ritual vessels for the internal organs removed during body …

The study of ancient pathogens using ancient DNA (aDNA) has revolutionized our
understanding of microbial diversity and its impact on human history. By reconstructing …

The recent review on ancient DNA in this journal by Willerslev and Cooper (2005) is timely. It
follows more than a decade of intensive research in this area, and others have also seen the …