Did you catch Covid-19? Perhaps you should blame your ancestors.
According to an article by Maggie Fox in the
CNN website:
“Genes inherited from Neanderthal ancestors may be involved in some cases of severe Covid-19 disease, researchers in Germany reported Wednesday.
A team of experts on Neanderthal genetics examined a strand of DNA that has been associated with some of the more serious cases of Covid-19 and compared it to sequences known to have been passed down to living Europeans and Asians from Neanderthal ancestors.
The DNA strand is found on chromosome 3, and a team of researchers in Europe has linked certain variations in this sequence with the risk of being more severely ill with Covid-19.
‘Here, we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment … that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by about 50% of people in South Asia and about 16% of people in Europe today,’ Svante Paabo and Hugo Zeberg of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote, in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Nature.”