Fingerprinting displaced molecular substances and environmental health in deep history: archaeo-xenobiotics

The emergence of high-throughput big-data approaches such as genomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics is currently transforming science and revealing highly disturbing facts about the impact of anthropogenic substances on today’s environment. To understand the impact of these results in a broader perspective for environmental health, we need a solid historic baseline, which is still largely missing. However, in most climates, the nature of DNA is a major limitation for palaeo-environmental investigations as preferential loss and/or contamination may occur. 

Our hypothesis is that a wide range of past human activities have left persistent, molecular traces and that application of a ‘multiomics’ approach can reveal key components of our understanding of the ongoing global environmental change, which have hitherto been untraceable even by stateof-the-art analyses. This project is to explore how contemporary environmental methods can be used to trace displaced substances, such as spices, medicine, stimulants, or drugs in past environments as examples of key vectors in a ‘deep’ history of human ecology. The same new methods also have a potential, so far untested, to unlock the historic impact of anthropogenic substances further back in time and in more types of archaeological stratigraphies. 

Here, we propose to test the capacity of high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS), in combination with advanced computational methods, to trace contamination and consumption of anthropogenic, circulated substances in the past. This will be based on explorations of archaeological deposits combined with ancient coprolite and sewer samples covering the diet of earliest hunters in South America to the Norse farmers in Greenland, and from consumption within Rome to the global “spice trade” since the Middle Ages. If the analytical development succeeds, this study may fundamentally transform future research into global environmental changes.