Inter-species intimacy meant modern man able to survive
MODERN humans might be extinct – wiped out by flu – had they not mated with Neanderthals, a study has suggested.
Scientists at Stanford University have discovered that the exchange of DNA between species protected humans from disease after they began to migrate from Africa.
Neanderthals became extinct about 40,000 years ago but most modern Europeans still carry about two per cent of their DNA in their genomes.
Researchers found the 152 genes inherited from Neanderthals interact with modern day influenza A and hepatitis C, and helped our ancestors fend off the diseases. “Our research shows that a substantial number of frequently occurring Neanderthal DNA snippets were adaptive for a very cool reason,” said Dr Dmitri Petrov, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
When first contact occurred between the two species, Neanderthals had been living outside of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, giving their immune systems ample time to evolve defences against infectious viruses in Europe.
Our newly emigrated ancestors, by comparison, would have been much more vulnerable. For the study scientists compiled a list of more than 4,500 genes in modern humans that are known to interact in some way with viruses.
They then checked this list against a database of sequenced Neanderthal DNA and identified 152 fragments of those genes from modern humans that were also present in Neanderthals.
“It made much more sense for modern humans to just borrow the already adapted genetic defences from Neanderthals rather than waiting for their own adaptive mutations to develop, which would have taken much more time,” added David Enard, a former postdoctoral fellow in Dr Petrov’s lab.
“Modern humans and Neanderthals are so closely related that it really wasn’t much of a genetic barrier for these viruses to jump. But that closeness also meant that Neanderthals could pass on protections against those viruses to us.”
The study was published in Cell.