What the Hadza Can Teach Us About the Microbiome We Lost—and How to Begin Rebuilding It

Your gut is home to a vanished world.

Not long ago, every human carried a teeming microbial menagerie—gut bacteria shaped by millions of years of co-evolution with wild foods, soil, animals, and one another. Today, most people in industrialised societies have lost a staggering amount of that internal biodiversity. The result? a fragile gut ecosystem increasingly linked to everything from autoimmune disease to obesity.

To see what we’ve lost, researchers have turned to the Hadza of Tanzania—one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies on Earth. Their microbiome, it turns out, looks nothing like ours. It pulses with diversity, shifts with the seasons, and includes entire microbial lineages that have all but disappeared from the modern gut.

This article explores what makes the Hadza microbiome so distinct, why it matters for our health, and how we might, through diet, lifestyle, and a bit of ecological thinking, begin to reclaim some of what we’ve left behind.

What Makes the Hadza Microbiome Uniquely Different From That of Industrialised Populations?

The Hadza gut is less a static organ and more a living landscape—rich, seasonal, and astonishingly wild. Unlike the pared-down microbiomes of modern urban dwellers, theirs brims with microbial lineages long vanished from industrialised guts: ancient Spirochaetes, diverse Prevotella, and a symphonic range of fibre-degrading species.

What sets them apart isn’t just diversity for its own sake, but functional richness. The Hadza microbiome contains a greater repertoire of enzymes that break down tough plant fibres—turning baobab, tubers, and wild seeds into a cascade of short-chain fatty acids like butyrate and propionate, molecules that calm inflammation, protect the gut lining, and even shape metabolic health.

Ours, by contrast, has grown timid. After decades of processed food, antibiotics, and antiseptic living, the Western gut has become a monoculture of sorts. But the Hadza remind us that we didn’t evolve this way. We evolved with dirt under our nails, fibre on our plates, and microbes that knew how to dance with all of it.

What Exactly Do the Hadza Eat—And How Does Each Food Shape Their Microbiome?

Here’s what we know about the primary Hadza dietary components—and what each one does inside the microbial ecosystem:

Tubers (e.g. ekwah, sanza, mbuhi)
These are the microbial heavy-lifters. Rich in resistant starch and insoluble fibre, Hadza tubers are essentially indigestible by the host—but ideal substrates for anaerobic fermentation by species like Ruminococcus, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, and Prevotella copri. Their breakdown fuels SCFA production, especially butyrate, which strengthens the epithelial barrier, regulates Treg cell activity, and promotes colonocyte health.
Interestingly, the physical act of chewing these fibrous tubers also introduces soil-based microbes directly into the gut, contributing environmental diversity often missing in sterilised modern diets.

Baobab Fruit Pulp (Adansonia digitata)
High in soluble fibre, mucilage, and polyphenols, baobab is a prebiotic powerhouse. It selectively nourishes bifidobacteria and lactobacilli, supports pH modulation through increased lactic acid, and contains flavonoids that influence microbial gene expression and quorum sensing.
Its prebiotic impact likely increases microbial cross-feeding—where one species produces metabolites another depends on—enhancing network resilience within the gut.

Wild Berries (various species, including Grewia bicolor, Cordia gharaf)
These are not the domesticated berries of supermarket shelves. Hadza berries contain a more complex matrix of fibres, tannins, polyphenols, and simple sugars. This combination supports both saccharolytic fermenters (e.g. Bacteroides uniformis) and phenolic-metabolising species (e.g. Eggerthella lenta), leading to diverse SCFA outputs and modulation of inflammation-related gene expression.

Berry polyphenols are also known to inhibit certain pathogenic strains without harming beneficial species—a natural form of microbial pruning.

Honey
Often dismissed as simple sugar, wild honey is anything but. Hadza honey contains raw nectar, pollen, bee enzymes, and environmental microbes. It’s a rare example of a carbohydrate source that both feeds fermenters like Bifidobacterium adolescentis and acts as a microbial inoculant.

It also offers context-dependent benefits: during the wet season when fibre intake drops and fructose dominates, certain species like Blautia and Bacteroides may rise to ferment these simpler sugars, maintaining energetic continuity within the microbiota.

Meat and Animal Organs
While not a direct fibre source, animal foods shape the Hadza microbiome through nitrogen cycling, bile acid profiles, and amino acid-derived substrates. Consumption of wild game—often in moderate amounts—stimulates microbial pathways related to branched-chain amino acids and secondary bile acids.

Microbes like Bilophila wadsworthia can increase in response to bile-tolerant conditions, though in the Hadza context (high fibre, low fat, no emulsifiers), these species may play a different role than they do in the Western gut, where their presence often correlates with inflammation.

Bee Larvae and Insects
Occasionally consumed bee brood and other insects add chitin—a tough polysaccharide found in exoskeletons—to the microbial mix. Certain gut bacteria like Akkermansia muciniphila and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron have shown chitinase activity, suggesting a potential niche role in Hadza guts for these under-studied substrates.

The immunological implications of insect-derived prebiotics are only just beginning to be understood, but early evidence suggests they may support mucosal immunity and microbial diversity.

In sum, the Hadza diet is not just high in fibre—it’s high in fibre complexity. It’s not just “plant-based”—it’s ecologically aligned, seasonal, and microbially interactive. Each food item introduces a different set of substrates, microniches, and even transient organisms, all of which collectively support a gut ecosystem more complex than any probiotic pill could replicate.

What’s Actually Living in the Hadza Gut?

Key Hadza Gut Microbes and Their Functions

Can We Recreate a Hadza-Like Microbiome in Modern Life?

The short answer is: not entirely. We can’t bottle ecological immersion or replicate the microbial exchange that comes from a shared life lived barefoot in the bush. But we can take cues. The Hadza don’t just eat more fibre—they eat fibres that are chemically diverse, structurally complex, and contextually embedded in a living ecosystem. That’s the piece missing from most “high-fibre” modern diets.

If you’re eating oats and taking inulin powder, you’re feeding a narrow guild of microbes. Compare that to the Hadza’s rotating menu of tubers, fruits, seeds, and wild flora, each one delivering distinct prebiotic compounds that nourish different microbial niches. It’s not about volume—it’s about variety.

Reintroducing this variety might start with simple shifts:

• Rotate your fibres—include resistant starches, pectins, hemicelluloses, and mucilaginous fibres.
• Seek out whole, wild, or fermented foods with intact microbial communities.
• Allow your diet to be seasonal—not just for nutrients, but for microbial cycling.

And perhaps most crucially: reframe your relationship with microbes themselves. The Hadza aren’t disinfecting their hands or irradiating their food. Their exposure starts at birth and continues in daily life—through dirt, shared meals, skin contact, and uncooked foods. We don’t have to abandon hygiene, but we might reconsider sterility as a default.

Rewilding your gut isn’t about mimicry. It’s about restoring lost relationships between food, environment, and the vast microbial cloud that connects them.

Practical Guide to Rewilding Your Microbiome (Without Moving to Tanzania)

You don’t need to spear an antelope to cultivate a microbiome with Hadza-like diversity—but you do need to think ecologically. Rewilding your gut means restoring lost inputs: fibrous complexity, environmental exposure, and microbial novelty.

Here’s how to start:

1. Eat 50+ Plant Species Per Week—And Make Them Wild When You Can
Don’t just count kale and carrots. Include herbs, spices, bitter greens, flowers, barks, and feral foods. Aim for diversity across plant parts—roots, stems, leaves, seeds, fruit, and fungi.
How to do it:

• Use a weekly plant diversity tracker (like the ‘Eat the Rainbow’ app or your own spreadsheet)
• Add dandelion, wild garlic, chickweed, nettles, sorrel, plantain, and hawthorn when foraging (with proper ID and safety)
• Shop farmers’ markets for heirloom and wild-type varieties
• Eat the parts most people discard: beet greens, radish tops, citrus pith

2. Get to Know Your Local Wild Foods—Then Eat Them (Safely)
Foraging introduces plants with unique phytochemicals and prebiotics that rarely appear in industrial agriculture. These compounds feed niche microbes and add metabolic variety.
Start here:

• Join a local foraging group or workshop
• Learn 5 wild edibles native to your biome and cycle them in seasonally
• Incorporate bitter greens and wild herbs into salads, teas, and pestos
• Let your food carry the microbial fingerprint of where you live

3. Reintroduce Soil-Based Microbes—Without the Parasites
Hadza children touch the earth, not sanitiser. You can too, without abandoning hygiene altogether.

• Grow herbs or salad greens in untreated soil and eat them unwashed (or lightly rinsed)
• Garden with bare hands
• Compost and spend time near microbial hotspots: leaf piles, decaying wood, forest floor
• Look into high-quality soil-based probiotics if you’re urban-bound

4. Practise Forest Bathing—Literally for the Microbiome
Spending time in biodiverse natural environments exposes you to airborne microbes from trees, soil, and leaf litter—many of which transiently colonise your skin, lungs, or even gut.

• Walk regularly in woodland, grassland, or wild green spaces
• Sit on the ground, touch bark, inhale through your nose
• The higher the biodiversity of the ecosystem, the stronger the effect

5. Embrace Fermentation—Especially the Wild Kind
Cultured foods are microbial training grounds. Prioritise those fermented by native environmental microbes rather than standardised lab strains.

• Try wild sauerkraut (just cabbage and salt) or kefir made with raw milk
• Use brine from one ferment to inoculate the next
• Consider fermenting foraged plants to combine both strategies

6. Let Seasonality Guide Your Microbiome
Hadza gut composition shifts with rainfall and food availability. Modern equivalents:

• Fast occasionally, particularly during times when fresh produce is less available, to simulate lean-season metabolic states
• Cycle your carbohydrates: more resistant starches and fibrous roots in winter; more fruits and simpler sugars in summer
• Let certain foods “go missing” for a while to mimic natural abundance–scarcity patterns

7. Avoid the Things That Collapse Microbial Complexity
What you avoid matters just as much as what you add.

• Skip unnecessary antibiotics and proton pump inhibitors
• Minimise ultra-processed foods, emulsifiers, and refined oils
• Avoid artificial sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame, which disrupt microbial signalling

Rewilding isn’t about imitation. It’s about relationship: with your food, your ecosystem, and the invisible community inside you that still remembers how we once lived.

What the Hadza Teach Us About Our Forgotten Microbial Selves

The Hadza way of life is vanishing. Not just theirs, but the broader pattern of human living that shaped the microbiome we once all carried—communal, land-based, unsterile, and richly seasonal.

For most of us, that world is gone. We’re not going to return to digging tubers or drinking from unfiltered streams. We live in compromise now—between convenience and connection, between industrial food systems and ancestral biology. But even within that compromise, there’s space for intelligent choice.

Understanding what fuels microbial diversity—dietary variety, fibre complexity, seasonal rhythms, exposure to microbes beyond the kitchen sink—gives us the tools to make meaningful change.

It can start with how you shop: choosing bitter greens over plastic-wrapped carbs, fresh herbs over shelf-stable sauces, fermented foods over sterile ones.

We can’t live like the Hadza. But we can learn from them. And that learning might just be enough to tilt the trajectory of our microbial inheritance, for ourselves, and for whoever comes next.