Ancient host-associated microbes obtained from mammoth remains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ancient genomic studies have extensively explored human-microbial interactions, yet research on non-human animals remains limited. In this study, we analyzed ancient microbial DNA from 483 mammoth remains spanning over 1 million years, including 440 newly sequenced and unpublished samples from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth. Using metagenomic screening, contaminant filtering, damage pattern analysis, and phylogenetic inference, we identified 310 microbes associated with different mammoth tissues. While most microbes were environmental or post-mortem colonizers, we recovered genomic evidence of six host-associated microbial clades spanning Actinobacillus, Pasteurella, Streptococcus, and Erysipelothrix. Some of these clades contained putative virulence factors, including a Pasteurella-related bacterium that had previously been linked to the deaths of African elephants. Notably, we reconstructed partial genomes of Erysipelothrix from the oldest mammoth sample, representing the oldest authenticated host-associated microbial DNA to date. This work demonstrates the potential of obtaining ancient animal microbiomes, which can inform further paleoecological and evolutionary research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".