The Secrets of King Richard IIIs Oral Microbiome: An Archaeogenetic Study of Teeth
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The Oral Microbiome of King Richard III: A Scientific Journey Through Time
The Oral Microbiome of King Richard III
Excavating a Royal Figure from History
In 2012, an unassuming car park in Leicester, England, gave way beneath the trowels of archaeologists to reveal one of the most thrilling archaeological finds of the 21st century: the remains of King Richard III. This groundbreaking discovery took place on the grounds of what was once the medieval Grey Friars Church, long since lost to history beneath the modern city's sprawl. The excavation context revealed a hasty burial without ceremony or shrouding, a fate that would prove scientifically invaluable centuries later.
The Controversial King and His Historical Legacy
King Richard III has been immortalized for centuries as a villain, thanks to disparaging portrayals by chroniclers and, most famously, by William Shakespeare. Yet his skeletal remains give us a direct way to revisit that legacy through a scientific lens. Richard ascended the throne during one of England's most turbulent periods, the Wars of the Roses, and met his end at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. His body, stripped of armor and hastily buried without coffin or ceremony, lay hidden until modern archaeology intervened. Skeletal analysis bore signs of his violent end, with multiple battle wounds confirming his grisly demise, while the distinctive curvature of his spine confirmed historical accounts of his physical deformity, identifying the condition as scoliosis.
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Scientific Revelations and DNA Preservation
Bringing Richard III into the light not only confirmed historical accounts of his hasty burial and perimortem injuries—including eleven battle scars and possible post-mortem humiliations—but also offered insight into less understood aspects of his life. Scientific analysis of his remains helped confirm his age and stature, and refined our understanding of his spinal deformity by identifying it as idiopathic adolescent-onset scoliosis. Most remarkably, the preservation of DNA within his dental calculus provided an extraordinary opportunity to examine ancient microbiota using modern metagenomic methods.
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Royal Diet and Lifestyle Insights
Isotopic analyses of Richard's teeth provided intriguing evidence of dietary changes that marked his journey from boyhood to kingship. The shift from a more ordinary diet to one rich in high-status foods such as wine and high-trophic level fish paints a picture of an increasingly opulent royal lifestyle. Yet despite this extravagant fare, analysis of his dental calculus revealed something rather striking: his oral microbiome did not differ greatly from those of his peers and less affluent contemporaries across Northern Europe. That challenges easy assumptions about the effects of rank and luxury on oral health.
The Study of Ancient Oral Microbiomes
Richard's dental calculus—or tooth tartar, which traps microbes over a lifetime—produced exceptional DNA samples. It contained nearly four hundred microbial species and stands as one of the best-preserved ancient oral metagenomes yet studied. More importantly, this microbiome showed remarkable diversity consistent with other populations across 7,000 years of Northern European history. In other words, despite differences in diet and status, human oral microbial communities appear to have been surprisingly stable over long stretches of time.
Comparative Analysis Across Historical Populations
Comparison of Richard's calculus with material from Neolithic to medieval individuals in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands reinforces that point. A king's lifestyle, for all its splendour, did not seem to reshape his oral bacterial profile in any dramatic way. Unlike the violent and highly distinctive circumstances of his death, Richard's oral microbiome reveals a kind of biological normalcy. What makes his remains extraordinary is not some uniquely royal suite of microbes, but the exceptional preservation and abundance of the microbial DNA itself. Since archaeological dental calculus usually comes from individuals of ordinary background, Richard's case is especially valuable for comparison.
Microbial Discoveries and Disease Patterns
Among the various pathogens, the bacterial species Tannerella forsythia was notably abundant in Richard's dental deposits, consistent with periodontitis—a common affliction then and now. This bacterium, well known today for its role in periodontal disease, forms part of the so-called "red complex" alongside Porphyromonas gingivalis. The recovery of a metagenome-assembled genome of this periopathogen sheds light on how similar ancient strains were to those found today, suggesting that these microbes have persisted for centuries with little variation in virulence. Studies of such microbial communities continue to provide valuable clues to the long history of oral disease.
Challenges in Ancient Dietary Reconstruction
While the preserved DNA offered substantial insight into Richard's oral health, the retrieval of dietary DNA proved elusive. Despite expectations of finding genetic traces from his feasts, very little plant and animal DNA could be recovered from the dental calculus. This underlines an important challenge in ancient DNA research: even with advanced techniques, distinguishing authentic dietary sequences remains difficult. The absence of convincing dietary DNA suggests that foods such as fish and wine do not leave a reliable genetic trace in mineralized plaque, making dental calculus a limited source for ancient dietary reconstruction.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.21.677585v1
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