UCSB graduate student Melanie Martin noticed something striking during her time in the field with the Tsimane people of Bolivia. Almost immediately after she and her husband decided they wanted to start a family, Martin was able to conceive — a phenomenon she attributed to the parasites she was studying.
As a relatively isolated population, the indigenous Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay) have been an active point of scientific study for their anomalous health patterns. “We look at what’s different and what’s similar between the Tsimane and Western populations,” UCSB anthropologist Michael Gurven told The New York Times. Gurven co-directs the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, a field site dedicated to biomedical and anthropological research established in 2001. The project has led to a number of scientific findings, such as establishing cardiovascular disease as a modern development. Other Tsimane scientific research focuses on DNA, lifespan, nutrition, disease, and fertility.
In an effort to establish a link between parasites and female fertility, Martin, Gurven, UCSB postdoctoral anthropology scholar Benjamin Trumble, and UCSB Assistant Professor of Anthropology Aaron Blackwell began to analyze 9 years worth of longitudinal data they had collected. The results of their study were published last week in Science, a renowned academic journal.