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Neanderthals infected by human diseases
Monday 11 April 2016

An article on heritagedaily - Neanderthals may have been infected by diseases carried out of Africa by humans - reports on a new study which suggests that Neanderthals across Europe may well have been infected with diseases carried out of Africa by waves of anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens. Researchers believe that as both were species of hominin, it would have been easier for pathogens to jump populations, which might have contributed to the demise of Neanderthals.

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford Brookes have reviewed the latest evidence gleaned from pathogen genomes and DNA from ancient bones, and concluded that some infectious diseases are likely to be many thousands of years older than previously believed.

Humans and Neanderthals
Despite anatomical differences, researchers believe that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals.

There is evidence that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and exchanged genes associated with disease. There is also evidence that viruses moved into humans from other hominins while still in Africa. Therefore, the researchers argue that humans could, in turn, pass disease to Neanderthals, especially if there was interbreeding.

Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, from Cambridge's Division of Biological Anthropology, states that many of the infections likely to have passed from humans to Neanderthals - such as tapeworm, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers and types of herpes - are chronic diseases that would have weakened the hunter-gathering Neanderthals, making them less fit and able to find food, which could have catalysed extinction of the species.

She argues that humans migrating out of Africa would have been a significant reservoir of tropical diseases, and for the Neanderthal population of Eurasia, adapted to that geographical infectious disease environment, exposure to new pathogens carried out of Africa may have been catastrophic.

New scientific techniques now allow genetic analysis of the distant past of modern disease. This, with extracting DNA from fossils of some of our earliest ancestors to detect traces of disease, has culminated in the recent paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology - Dr Houldcroft and Dr Simon Underdown, a researcher in human evolution from Oxford Brookes University, write that genetic data shows many infectious diseases have been co-evolving with humans and our ancestors for tens of thousands to millions of years.

 
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The longstanding view of infectious disease is that it exploded with the dawning of agriculture some 8,000 years ago, as increasingly dense and sedentary human populations coexisted with livestock, from which disease spread. The researchers now believe the latest evidence suggests disease had a much longer burn in period that pre-dates agriculture.

In fact, they argue that many diseases traditionally thought to be 'zoonoses', transferred from herd animals into humans, such as tuberculosis, were actually transmitted into the livestock by humans in the first place.

Although there is as yet no hard evidence of infectious disease transmission between humans and Neanderthals, the researchers suggest that considering the overlap in time and geography, and not least the evidence of interbreeding, it must have occurred.

Neanderthals would have adapted to the diseases of their European environment. There is evidence that humans benefited from receiving genetic components through interbreeding that protected them from some of these: types of bacterial sepsis - blood poisoning occurring from infected wounds - and encephalitis caught from ticks that inhabit Siberian forests. However, the humans, unlike Neanderthals, would have been adapted to African diseases, which they would have brought with them during waves of expansion into Europe and Asia.

Which diseases? The researchers suggest Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes stomach ulcers. It is estimated to have first infected humans in Africa from 116,000 to 88,000 years ago, and arrived in Europe after 52,000 years ago. The most recent evidence suggests Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago.

Another candidate - herpes simplex 2, the virus which causes genital herpes. There is evidence preserved in the genome of this disease that suggests it was transmitted to humans in Africa 1.6 million years ago from another, currently unknown hominin species that in turn acquired it from chimpanzees.

Houldcroft states that the intermediate hominin that bridged the virus between chimps and humans shows that diseases could leap between hominin species. The herpes virus is transmitted sexually and through saliva. As we now know that humans bred with Neanderthals, and we all carry 2.5% of Neanderthal DNA as a result, it makes sense to assume that, along with bodily fluids, humans and Neanderthals transferred diseases.

Sole cause of Neanderthal extinction? No, a combination of factors caused the demise of Neanderthals, but evidence is building to show that spread of disease was an important one.

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