Genetics have firmly established that about two percent of the DNA of all living people outside of Africa was transferred from our relatives, the Neanderthals. Hard to imagine why our ancestors first decided to mate with them. In the end, the Neanderthals were submitted to us is completely foreign. But given the circumstances, perhaps we shouldn’t judge them.
Today, scientists are trying to figure out how and how much of the DNA of Neanderthals has been found in our bodies and what role it can play in determining how we look and how we feel and our susceptibility to certain diseases.
One of the first traits that are associated with Neanderthals, become red hair. A set of Neanderthal genes responsible for light hair and skin, geneticists identifitsirovan was over ten years ago and is associated with human survival at high latitudes, in poor light, like Europe.
Since Neanderthals lived in Europe a few hundred thousand years, it was found that natural selection gave them light skin and hair color, which helps to prevent diseases like rickets.
But as often happens in science, the situation is much more complicated than you think. Red hair was inherited from Neanderthals. It turns out that they didn’t even have to do this, gene!
Red hair was a unique human trait, as shown by a new study conducted by Michael Dannemann and Janet Kelso of the Institute of evolutionary anthropology max Planck and published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
It is astonishing and ironic that half of all Neanderthal genes in our genome plays a role in the determination of skin color and hair. However, new research shows that Neanderthal genes affect these traits are not more than unique human genes that we have.
What does it all mean? For some time, tens of thousands of years, natural selection has provided an excellent balance between the Neanderthal and human genes for these traits. Now we know that people with light skin and hair have the best fragments of both genomes according to these characteristics.
Among the other genes inherited from Neanderthals, there are those that are associated with how easy people sunbathing and getting sunburns.
And a particularly interesting conclusion from this study was the role that the genes of the Neanderthals play in the structures of people’s sleep-defined circadian rhythms of the body. The natural cycles of night and day, which vary widely depending on latitude and time of year greatly affect our circadian rhythms.
Danneman, and Kelso was looking for a connection between latitude and the prevalence of Neanderthal forms ASB1 gene, which plays a role in the definition of “owl” or “lark”, and is associated with the need for daytime sleep and even with narcolepsy.
It turned out that the non-African population living far from the equator, today shows a higher prevalence ASB1 than the people living next to it.
Circadian rhythms of the human clinically important because of widely known 24-hour changes in the levels of glucose, insulin and leptin in the blood, which controls our appetite. Some of the recently discovered genes of Neanderthals were associated with the growth of adults as well as with posture, which appears in children upon reaching the age of 10, with a pulse and distribution of fat in the legs.
Other Neanderthal genes, apparently, help to define moods, for example, when we go out in the sun, or preferences in meat. Already for anybody not news that our ancestors mingled with prehistoric people like Neanderthals. Their decision to mate with Neanderthals, whatever reason, continues to resonate after tens of thousands of years. Neanderthal genes play a very important role today, affecting the way we look, feel and behave, including determining our susceptibility to disease associated with Western lifestyle and diet.
Evolutionary history – amazing stuff. It would seem only a few percent of the genes of modern man were inherited from another species, and remnants of this heritage can be heard to this day. The study is crucial for understanding how we deal with this legacy.
The genes of Neanderthals associated with poor sleep and obesity
Ilya Hel