Europeans used to have more Neanderthal DNA than we have now ...
… the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans 45,000 years ago has declined from between 3% and 6% to around 2% in Europeans today. The researchers think that natural selection has reduced Neanderthal ancestry over time.
… Neanderthal DNA is slightly toxic to modern humans…
Perhaps Neanderthal DNA was more useful during the ice age, but is less useful now. Or perhaps it was never that handy — though hybrids were not rare.
It would be interesting to know what disadvantages/diseases moderns get from Neanderthal genes. Once we might have looked at gene products, but now we know things are rarely so simple. Genes are like letters in the English alphabet, not characters in Chinese. The letter ‘a’ contributes to both “Bad” and “Glad”, but those words (gene products) appear in many sentences and paragraphs (phenotypes).
There have been some early studies …
- Neandertal DNA may raise risk for some modern human diseases: circadian controls, bladder behaviors, nicotine addiction, rapid clotting, allergies (but better resistance to some diseases) … “Some parts of the human genome don’t contain any Neandertal DNA at all, while other parts may be 60 percent or more Neandertal”
- Neanderthals’ DNA legacy linked to modern ailments | Harvard Gazette
I’d wondered about osteoarthritis, but so far that’s not shown up.
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