In the five years since scientists confirmed Neanderthal DNA is present in people of Eurasian ancestry, headlines have tended toward either the jocular or the melodramatic:
“Neanderthal chefs spiced up their diet” … “Neanderthals drew first #hashtags” … “Bone-chilling secrets of Neanderthal sex”.
On Thursday, a straightforward, even prosaic headline was stripped across the top of an article in the journal Science:
“Neanderthal-Derived DNA May Influence Depression and More in Modern Humans”
If anything, that’s an understatement.
The first-ever study directly comparing Neanderthal DNA to the human genome confirmed a wide range of health-related associations — from the psychiatric to the podiatric — that link modern humans to our broad-browed relatives.
“Our main finding is that Neanderthal DNA does influence clinical traits in modern humans,” lead author John Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at Vanderbilt University, said in a statement.
Among the more intriguing points: Snippets of Neanderthal DNA contribute to the contemporary risk for myriad ills, including heart attack, nicotine addiction and mood disorders as well as incontinence, foot callouses and precancerous skin lesions.
Those skin conditions as well as depression are known to be influenced by sunlight exposure, which is why the researchers think Neanderthals’ eventual migration from southern to northern hemispheres influenced their genetic susceptibility — and ours.
Some Neanderthal genes, appearing at a much higher frequency than the scientists expected, would have provided a benefit in early human populations as they moved between continents. But those same genes became disadvantageous hundreds of thousands years later.
