Thousands of Neanderthal genes 'still influence people in Britain today'
People in Britain today are actively influenced by thousands of genes inherited from Neanderthals, a study has shown.
Some 4,303 differences in DNA are playing a substantial role in modern humans in Britain, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, found.
Genetic variants inherited from Neanderthals affect 47 distinct genetic traits, such as how fast someone can burn calories or a person's natural immune resistance to certain diseases.
Previous scientific discoveries have shown that Neanderthal genes comprise some 1% to 4% of the genome of present-day humans whose ancestors migrated out of Africa.
Co-lead author Xinzhu 'April' Wei said: "Interestingly, we found that several of the identified genes involved in modern human immune, metabolic and developmental systems might have influenced human evolution after the ancestors' migration out of Africa."
Read more: Neanderthals and humans 'were at war for 100,000 years'
A team including Cornell University researchers developed a new suite of computational genetic tools to address the genetic effects of interbreeding between humans of non-African ancestry and Neanderthals that took place 50,000 years ago.
The study applies only to descendants of those who migrated from Africa before Neanderthals died out, and, in particular, those of European ancestry.
Wei said: "We have made our custom software available for free download and use by anyone interested in further research."
Using a vast dataset from the UK Biobank consisting of genetic and trait information of nearly 300,000 Britons of non-African ancestry, the researchers analysed more than 235,000 genetic variants likely to have originated from Neanderthals.
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Unlike previous studies that could not fully exclude genes from modern human variants, the new study leveraged more precise statistical methods to focus on the variants attributable to Neanderthal genes. The research used a dataset of almost exclusively white individuals living in the UK.
The new computational methods developed by the team could offer a path forward in gleaning evolutionary insights from other large databases to delve deeper into archaic humans' genetic influences on modern humans.
Senior investigator Sriram Sankararaman, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "For scientists studying human evolution interested in understanding how interbreeding with archaic humans tens of thousands of years ago still shapes the biology of many present-day humans, this study can fill in some of those blanks.
"More broadly, our findings can also provide new insights for evolutionary biologists looking at how the echoes of these types of events may have both beneficial and detrimental consequences."
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