Microbes frozen for thousands of years in ancient rubbish heaps have helped reconstruct early Greenlanders’ farms, seal hunts, and toilets.

Research Findings

The thawing waste dumps — known as middens — are revealing their secrets as the Arctic warms up to four times faster than the global average, say scientists.

Human settlements on the world’s largest island, 80% of which is covered by a massive ice sheet, date back around 4,500 years with the first being several Paleo-Inuit cultures.

Descendants of Vikings inhabited Greenland between the 10th and 15th centuries, while Danes have lived there since 1721.

All left their traces on the landscape, for instance in the form of ancient domestic rubbish heaps.

Composed of waste — including animal bones, excrement, mollusc shells, and human artifacts — the dumps have proved a precious resource for modern archaeologists.

Frank Møller Aarestrup, a professor at the National Food Institute of Denmark Technical University, said: ‘The risk of release of ancient pathogens from ancient middens on Greenland is currently low.’

The research team used DNA sequencing to reconstruct entire bacterial communities.

The sequencing revealed between nine and 202 bacterial species per midden, for a total of 1,207 species.

Many of the species were previously undescribed and could only be assigned to broad taxonomic categories.

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.