Anthropology.to.go

This blog, will whet your appetite for substantial knowledge from the fields of environmental-human history,served in easily digestible tidbits.

My first post is about a surprising discovery on the subject of COVID-19, which we owe to the recent Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo and his team of palaeogeneticists

Fatal legacy

Researchers identified a gene variant on human chromosome 3 🧬 that makes people more susceptible to severe courses of COVID-19 😨. This variation is very unevenly distributed. While it hardly occurs in China and Africa, more than half of all Bengalis and a third of all South Asians bear this gene form. 8% of all Europeans are also carriers of the dangerous variant. Scientists suspect that we have inherited the pernicious variant from Neanderthals. How much Neanderthal is in you? Learn more about our stone age-legacy on this in my next article.