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Neanderthals mysteriously disappeared about 40,000 years ago, but before vanishing they interbred with another human species that was just beginning its global spread, said researchers from the Stanford University in the US. Arriving in Eurasia, they met the Neanderthals who were already adapted to those geographical areas.
In the study, the researchers gathered a large dataset of several thousand proteins that interact with viruses in modern humans. The obvious conclusion is that these genes protected us against the ancient variety of RNA viruses that humans must have encountered while they were still fresh out of Africa, the authors reported in the journal Cell. This means that the Neanderthals’ immune systems were already much more accustomed to the viruses and diseases in Europe and Asia compared to the humans who were still much more vulnerable at the time. The analysis identified 152 fragments of those from modern humans that were also found in Neanderthals. The flu virus can, for example, be treated as “key” to “lock” the protein of the cell surface, causing the human cell to let him in.
Researchers at the Universities of Arizona and Stanford published a study in the journal Cell, according to which the breeding of early humans with Neanderthals resulted in creating offspring resistant to unsafe diseases that were similar to flu or hepatitis. According to estimates, numerous inhabitants of Europe and Asia retain from one to 4% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.
The findings coincide with previous studies that found that the genes associated with immunology, common in parts of the DNA of Neanderthals that available to people. Other studies have shown that the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians, probably, differently have interacted with Neanderthals. Their earlier research focused on how viruses impacted the evolution of humans. Those sequences are publicly available to investigators in the field. However, now scientists have conclusive evidence that two species of primitive people not only fought, but also mingled with each other.
“Many Neanderthal sequences have been lost in modern humans, but some stayed and appear to have quickly increased to high frequencies at the time of contact, suggestive of their selective benefits at that time”, Petrov says. “The search for the remains of RNA viruses is very old – quite a hopeless case”, explains Enard. Enard notes in the statement that the RNA in the ancient viruses that drove the selection for the Neanderthal genes was far too fragile to survive to the present day, but “because we know which genes interact with which viruses, we can infer the types of viruses responsible for ancient disease outbreaks”.
The study concluded that interbreeding between ancient humans and Neanderthals provided us the immunity against some ancient viral epidemics.
“One of the things that population geneticists have wondered about is why we have maintained these stretches of Neanderthal DNA in our own genomes”, Enard adds. This could potentially inform better ways to monitor for and treat future epidemics.
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