Lecture: "Evolutionary Perspectives on Fermented Food Consumption"

Featuring Dr. Katherine Amato (Northwestern University) * This in-person talk will also be offered on Zoom, but requires registration. Click here to register for Zoom access * Unlike most other vertebrates, humans utilize fermented foods as a central part of their diets globally. However, it remains unclear when during our evolutionary history, and why, humans began to consume fermented foods. In this talk, I will review existing knowledge regarding the timing and impetus for the emergence of fermented food use by humans. I will also present comparative behavioral and physiological data from extant nonhuman primates regarding the environmental contexts in which fermented foods are consumed. Using this information as a foundation, I will explore the hypothesis that fermented food use began as a nutritional strategy for early humans occupying harsh environments. In honor of the Maxwell Museum's temporary exhibit "Entangled Cultures: How Humans and Microbes Co-create through Fermentation," which closes Dec. 5, 2026, we are honored to have Dr. Amato join us this Fall semester. The event is co-sponsored by the UNM Department of Anthropology and the UNM Department of Biology. Dr. Katherine Amato is a biological anthropologist studying the influence of gut microbes on host ecology and evolution. Her research examines how changes in the gut microbiota impact host nutrition, energetics, and health. She uses non-human primates as models for studying host-gut microbe interactions in selective environments and for providing comparative insight into the evolution of the human gut microbiota. Her main foci are understanding how the gut microbiome may buffer hosts during periods of nutritional stress and how the gut microbiome programs normal inter-specific differences in host metabolism. In this realm, she is also interested in global variation in the human gut microbiome and its implications for local human adaptation. Dr. Amato obtained her A.B. in Biology from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern in 2015. Dr. Amato is the President of the Midwest Primate Interest Group, an Associate Editor at Microbiome, an Editorial Board member at Folia Primatologica, and a Fellow for the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research’s ‘Humans and the Microbiome’ Program.