Two independent studies suggest that people prone to allergies have inherited it from our Neanderthal ancestors.
Interbreeding of modern humans with the Neanderthals occurred in Europe based on the DNA analysis of an ancient jawbone, as HNGN previously reported. While we can thank the Neanderthals for giving us the ability to fight infections, it comes along with the ability to overreact to allergens as well.
Researchers led by Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS in Paris studied the genetic data collected by the 1000 Genomes Project and compared it with the genes of ancient hominins. They saw genetic patterns and evolutionary changes in regions where the Neanderthals existed, particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia. They estimated that the interbreeding between modern humans and the Neanderthals occurred in the last 6,000 to 13,000 years.
"We found that interbreeding with archaic humans--the Neanderthals and Denisovans--has influenced the genetic diversity in present-day genomes at three innate immunity genes belonging to the human Toll-like-receptor family," Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a press release.
The findings of the studies, published in the Jan. 7 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, provide new evidence of how interbreeding among two species influenced human evolution.
"What has emerged from our study as well as from other work on introgression is that interbreeding with archaic humans does indeed have functional implications for modern humans, and that the most obvious consequences have been in shaping our adaptation to our environment - improving how we resist pathogens and metabolize novel foods," Kelso said.
