The Forests, Humanity’s Close Cousins

 I watched a segment of NOVA on PBS this week, and I have been thinking a lot about this research finding shared in this clip from the transcript:

NARRATOR: In the soil around their roots, trees and plants cultivate microbes to break down the minerals they need and to fight off harmful bacteria. Just as we rely on microbes in our guts to digest our food, plants also need a healthy microbiome, the rhizosphere that surrounds their roots.

GEORGE MONBIOT: The rhizosphere might lie outside the plant, but it’s the plant’s external gut. And to make this comparison even spookier, of the thousand or so phyla of bacteria, the major groups, there are four that dominate in the rhizosphere, and there are four that dominate in the human gut. And they’re the same four.

It’s probably spookiest to those who consider humans far removed from what goes on inside the forest community.