Meta-analyses are becoming more widespread as computational power increases, sometimes employing past studies that were not intended as reference sets in that new role. Moeller et al. [29] reused the Global Gut [28] data to paint a compelling picture of the coevolution of hominids and their gut communities, highlighting a departure that humans have appeared to take with respect to our closest ancestors. The data suggest that the rate of change in the human microbiome is significantly higher since divergence with chimpanzee, particularly in US adults, including a significant decrease in alpha diversity. The motivation to reuse the Global Gut data was access to samples collected from hunter-gatherer groups as well as western adults, enabling the researchers to test the hypothesis that hunter-gatherer groups are more similar from a microbial perspective to our closest ancestors potentially due to the dramatic dietary differences that exist between these groups and western populations. However, the sample size for any given age group and population combination (e.g., infant Malawians) within Global Gut was relatively small, so it would be interesting to revisit this and
