Passage:
Dental calculus—mineralized dental plaque formed primarily of calcium phosphate salts such as hydroxyapatite—has emerged as one of the most resilient biological archives in paleogenomics and bioarchaeology. Whereas osseous remains and tooth dentin are highly susceptible to post-mortem diagenetic leaching and hydrolytic DNA deamination from groundwater percolation, the rapid in vivo entombment of organic matter within the dense mineral matrix of calculus provides an alkaline microenvironment that preserves biomolecules with exceptional integrity. Recent paleoproteomic and metagenomic investigations have leveraged these properties to reconstruct ancient human health, subsistence strategies, and artisanal practices.
Christina Warinner and her colleagues demonstrated the utility of high-throughput shotgun sequencing on ancient calculus by recovering intact dietary proteins—specifically the milk protein beta-lactoglobulin—from Eurasian steppe pastoralists, while simultaneously confirming that subgingival calculus matrices yielded significantly higher proportions of obligate anaerobic periodontal pathogens than supragingival deposits. In a complementary line of inquiry, Keith Dobney and his research group analyzed dental calculus from Neanderthal specimens recovered from El Sidrón Cave in Spain and Spy Cave in Belgium. Their analysis revealed distinct dietary regimes, documenting traces of poplar bark (which contains the natural analgesic salicylic acid) alongside Penicillium molds in an El Sidrón specimen afflicted with a dental abscess, whereas the Spy Cave specimens yielded proteomic markers indicative exclusively of a carnivorous megafaunal diet without traces of medicinal plant ingestion.
Tracing long-term microevolutionary dynamics, James Weyrich mapped historical shifts in the human oral microbiome across major subsistence transitions. Weyrich's sequencing established that the transition from foraging to early cereal agriculture coincided with a marked reduction in oral microbial diversity, followed millennia later by a second, more severe bottleneck during the Industrial Revolution, when the widespread availability of industrially refined sucrose allowed cariogenic lineages, particularly specific strains of Streptococcus mutans, to outcompete commensal oral taxa. Meanwhile, Anita Radini expanded the analytical purview of calculus research beyond dietary reconstruction by developing protocols to extract inhaled and non-dietary micro-debris. Radini identified embedded ultramarine lapis lazuli pigments in the dental calculus of an eleventh-century German religious woman, establishing that the subject had engaged directly in the illumination of high-status liturgical manuscripts, likely through the habit of licking paintbrush bristles.
Based on the passage, match each researcher or research group with the specific finding or investigative methodology explicitly attributed to them.
- Christina Warinner and colleaguesDifferentiating the relative concentrations of anaerobic periodontal pathogens between subgingival and supragingival calculus deposits
- Keith Dobney and colleaguesDetecting chemical traces of natural analgesics and molds in a specimen afflicted with a localized dental pathology
- James WeyrichIdentifying a marked decline in oral microbial diversity corresponding to the historical transition to cereal cultivation
- Anita RadiniRecovering non-nutritional mineral pigment micro-debris to provide evidence of high-status manuscript illumination