A team of experts specializing in Neanderthals genetics has examined a patch of DNA associated with the more severe cases of Covid-19. That piece of DNA has been compared to strands of DNA that are clearly passed on to Europeans and Asians descended from Neanderthals. People who have the genetic material are three times more likely to need a ventilator if they become ill with the coronavirus, according to the researchers.
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“The risk is caused by a hereditary segment coming from Neanderthals and today carried by about half of the people in South Asia and about 16 percent of Europeans,” write Svante Paabo and Hugo Zeberg of the Max. Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in a paper published by the scientific journal Nature.
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“Modern humans inherited this gene variant through crosses between Neanderthals and humans some 60,000 years ago,” Zeberg said in a statement. according to CNN. “The people who have that gene variant today are three times more likely to need artificial respiration if they contract the coronavirus.”
In far from all patients who are seriously affected by the virus, the explanation can be found in the piece of ‘Neanderthal DNA’ – only a small percentage is involved. “Nevertheless, it does have tragic consequences in the current pandemic,” Paabo and Zeberg conclude in their study.
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