Genes that have been passed down to modern humans by their Neanderthal forefathers may play a crucial role in some cases of serious COVID-19 infections, scientists revealed on Wednesday.
Neanderthals are an extinct species of prehistoric humans who inhabited Eurasia until around 40,000 years ago. Based on research by European scientists, published by Nature journal, a mass of genes have been associated to a bigger risk of hospitalization and lung damage in people who have contracted COVID-19.
A group of scientists focusing on Neanderthal genetics analyzed a strain of DNA that has been tied to some of the severe cases of the virus and compared the genes to strands that Asians and Europeans may have inherited from their Neanderthal predecessors, the Guardian reported.
The genetic inheritance, part of a so-called interbreeding that occurred over 50,000 years ago, has left approximately 15 percent of Southern Europeans and 50 percent of South Asians in the modern period having these genes in their system.
Neanderthals and modern humans are believed to have intermixed at different timeframes in the past, and ending up in a genetic trade-off than is still in existence today. Scientists said the genes are among multiple risk factors for the coronavirus diseased, including sex, age, and preexistent health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
In a Nature publication, Hugo Zeberg and Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote that that the risk is "conferred by a genomic segment ... that's inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by around half of people in South Asia and 16 percent of people in Europe today," CNN quoted the authors as saying in their journal report.
According to Paabo, chief of the Human Evolutionary Genomics studies at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, it is evident that the genetic legacy from Neanderthals has such disastrous outcomes in the ongoing global health crisis.
The scientist, who led an extensive study that first decoded the Neanderthal genome in 2010, estimates that roughly 100,000 more have so far perished in the ongoing pandemic because of the genetic inheritance from Neanderthals.
