The ancient Neanderthals played a huge role in determining the makeup of the modern day human immune system, according to a new study published last week in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
It was discovered that Neanderthals interbred with ancient humans thousands of years ago and as recently as 37,000 years ago, according to discovery.com. This formed the basis for the modern day human’s ability to fight diseases, as well as gives them the tendency towards allergies.
As a result of interbreeding with “these archaic humans, we modern humans gained these advantageous adaptations,” according to Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany. In a statement, Kelso added, “Neanderthals, likely (were) well adapted to the local climate, food and pathogens…” They lived in Europe and Western Asia. This would have been 200,000 years before the arrival of modern humans to their locale.
Previous genetic studies suggest this interbreeding resulted in as much as 2.5 percent of the DNA of today’s Europeans being derived from Neanderthals and, up to 6 percent of modern DNA originating from ancient hominins, making the basis for much of the modern human immune system.
In the new study, scientists researched a vast trove of modern DNA from the 1000 Genomes Project and made comparisons to modern human DNA with genomes from ancient hominins. They focused on the innate immune system, paying special attention to about 1,500 genes that have previously been found to play a role in the body’s first line of defense against bacteria.
After constructing a time line of when these genes became widespread in the population, they also determined whether those changes had been inherited from ancient hominins such as Neanderthals.
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