The first Homo sapiens that arrived in Europe from Africa more than 40,000 years ago carried with them certain ailments that they could transmit to the Neanderthals who inhabited the Old Continent. This is reflected in a new essay published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology , in which a team of scientists from different British institutions points out that the close relationship between these species – it is known that both were crossed, so there was an exchange gene – could make diseases jump easily from one population to another.
To determine this, these experts have studied the genome of different pathogens and the DNA conserved in prehistoric bone remains. In this way, they have found out that some infectious diseases are much older than what has been thought so far .
Virologist Charlotte Houldcroft, from the Division of Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, co-author of this work, assures that many of the ailments that humans could pass to Neanderthals, such as tuberculosis, stomach ulcers or some types of herpes They are chronic ills that weakened our evolutionary cousins and perhaps contributed to their demise . “Humans would have acted as a reservoir for tropical diseases. For Neanderthals, who lived in small groups of 15 to 30 members, exposure to the new pathogens would have been catastrophic, “he says.
Our ancestors , by contrast, appear to have benefited in part from contact with Neanderthals . Although they were exposed to the diseases that the latter developed, modern humans ended up adding certain elements to their DNA that, over time, protected them, for example, from certain forms of encephalitis and septicemia.
Image: Matt Celeskey / CC
