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When Homo sapiens crossed paths with their Neanderthal cousins tens of thousands of years ago in Europe, they also encountered dangerous new pathogens—and, though interbreeding, the genes to fight those infections, a new study suggests. As the researchers report today (October 4) in Cell, genes for virus-recognizing proteins are relatively common among the tiny percentage of modern humans’ DNA that originated in Neanderthals.
The paper’s authors, Dmitri Petrov of Stanford University and his former postdoc, David Enard of the University of Arizona, note that the H. sapiens who left Africa for Europe tens of thousands of years ago would likely have encountered pathogens that Neanderthals had long been exposed to. They reasoned that descendants of H. sapien–Neanderthal interbreeding events who carried Neanderthal genes for pathogen-fighting proteins would have been more likely to survive and pass the genes along.
“It made much more sense for modern humans ...
