My first thoughts are (without access to the actual article)
* We have lost the microbiome that primates present
* have we gained other microbes?
* what did those microbes we lost do? If they break down heavy fibre (branches) we may simply not need them, so evolution would stop selecting for them
* This says cities, but it (a) only appears to look at the US, and (b) the article doesn't mention comparing to non-city dwellers in the US. Saying "cities" without also providing a non-city reference seems bogus, but also could simply be left out of the article.
* Following from the "US only" comment above - how stable is this microbiome between geographical regions in the US?, how about different countries in close geographic location (think Europe)?, or geographically separated countries with similar culture? different culture?
All of these things might be answered in the paper, but per-usual Science has given us a fairly useless summary article with a clickbait headline :-(
[Edited to bring back formatting. For a text only, anti-emoji, etc site HN is obnoxiously opposed to basic white space formatting :-/]
* We have lost the microbiome that primates present
* have we gained other microbes?
* what did those microbes we lost do? If they break down heavy fibre (branches) we may simply not need them, so evolution would stop selecting for them
* This says cities, but it (a) only appears to look at the US, and (b) the article doesn't mention comparing to non-city dwellers in the US. Saying "cities" without also providing a non-city reference seems bogus, but also could simply be left out of the article.
* Following from the "US only" comment above - how stable is this microbiome between geographical regions in the US?, how about different countries in close geographic location (think Europe)?, or geographically separated countries with similar culture? different culture?
All of these things might be answered in the paper, but per-usual Science has given us a fairly useless summary article with a clickbait headline :-(
[Edited to bring back formatting. For a text only, anti-emoji, etc site HN is obnoxiously opposed to basic white space formatting :-/]