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Did Neanderthals give us a brainy gift?


A gene type that governs brain size, which may have had a Neanderthal origin, exists in modern humans (Image: iStockphoto)

Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift, a gene that helped them develop superior brains, US researchers report.

And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding, say the scientists.

Their study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe.

"Finding evidence of mixing is not all that surprising. But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread," says Professor Bruce Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Chicago who led the study.

Scientists have been debating whether Neanderthals, who died out about 35,000 years ago, ever bred with modern H. sapiens. Neanderthals are considered more primitive, with robust bones but a smaller intellects than modern humans.

Lahn's team found a brain gene that appears to have entered the human lineage about 1.1 million years ago.

It has a modern form, or allele, that appeared about 37,000 years ago, right before Neanderthals became extinct.


Positive selection means the gene conferred some sort of advantage, so that people who had it were more likely to have descendants than people who did not.

A common variant

Lahn's team estimate that 70% of all living humans have this type D variant of the gene.




By tracking smaller, more regular mutations, the researchers looked at DNA's genetic clock and dated the original genetic variant to 37,000 years ago.


What's the advantage?

Lahn says it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain.


Now his team is looking for evidence of Neanderthal origin for other human genes.

Tags: cloning-and-dna, neuroscience, palaeontology