BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—Research conducted by a team led by Andrew Moeller of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that modern humans and the bacteria in their digestive tracts evolved together. The Guardian reports that Moeller and his team collected fecal samples from Tanzanian chimpanzees, Cameroonian gorillas, Congolese bonobos, and humans from Connecticut. They found that when two new species split from a common ancestor, at least two groups of gut bacteria did the same. “When there were no humans or gorillas, just ancestral African apes, they harbored gut bacteria. Then the apes split into different branches, and there was also a parallel divergence of different gut bacteria,” Moeller explained. He added that different strains of human gut bacteria could be used to reconstruct patterns of human migration. To read more, go to "Life (According to Gut Microbes)."
