Reconstruction of a NeanderthalWIKIMEDIA, STEFAN SCHEER
Our ancestors' sexual relations with Neanderthals and the recently-discovered Denisovans might have shaped modern humans' ability to fight diseases. An international team of collaborators published evidence in Science this week that human immune genes are a mixture of Neanderthal, Denisovan, and ancestral human DNA—and that for some of these genes, archaic alleles are the majority.
“For 15 years there's been this idea that we all came out of Africa and nothing interesting came from Neanderthals, and it's sort of not true,” said John Hawks, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in this study. Recent genetic work has pointed to a history of modern human ancestors mating with Neanderthals—whose remains have been found in Europe and Asia—and the Denisovans of ...
