How went extinct is one of the in our species' history. Researchers have long wondered if our might have succumbed to viral infections that plague modern humans today. That thinly evidenced theory, , has become a little more plausible with the discovery of ancient DNA from three found in , unearthed at Chagyrskaya cave in Russia.
Previously, researchers suggested that infectious diseases could have contributed to the Neanderthals' demise based on of when those pathogens first infected humans – long enough ago that humans could have and passed them on to Neanderthals in Europe. Otherwise, researchers have used mathematical models to between and Neanderthals ( ), and their differing immunity. But with ancient DNA so difficult to sample and sequence, fragmented by all the thousands of years it has weathered, more direct evidence that Neanderthals were infected by pathogens that cause common illnesses today, but could have killed our kin, has been lacking.
"To support [this] provocative and interesting hypothesis, it would be necessary to prove that at least the genomes of these viruses can be found in remains," molecular biologist and senior author of the new study, Marcelo Briones, . "That is what we did." Briones, along with evolutionary geneticist Renata Ferreira of the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil and colleagues, sampled DNA from the skeletons of two male Neanderthals.
There, amongst the Neanderthal genome, they found snippets of DNA that resembled three mod.
