Transl Psych: Human preferences for alcohol and tobacco were inherited from Neanderthals, and this increased the risk of brain disease

For a long time, we know that human brain diseases such as nervous system diseases and mental diseases have the characteristics of family aggregation, which indicates that these diseases have a certain hereditary nature

It's extremely difficult to answer these questions, and Svante P?, the founder of Paleogenomics and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Today, there are still 1%-4% Neanderthal genes in the modern human genome

On October 5, 2022, researchers at the Free University of Berlin published a publication in the journal Translational Psychiatry titled: Neandertal introgression partitions the genetic landscape of neuropsychiatric disorders and associated behavioral phenotypes Research papers

The research team analyzed the relationship between the Neanderthal genome and more than 100 kinds of brain diseases and sleep, smoking, drinking and other characteristics of modern humans, and the results show that tens of thousands of years ago, gene flow between humans and Neanderthals made a significant contribution to human behavioral phenotypes, but did not have a direct impact on mental and nervous system diseases, and some Neanderthal genes may have indirectly promoted human disease risk by influencing human behavior (such as smoking, drinking habits, sleep patterns).

The team compared Neanderthal DNA with human genomic data from the UK Biobank, and while Neanderthal DNA showed links to several features associated with diseases of the central nervous system in modern humans, the diseases themselves did not show any significant association

The team further compared other databases, such as the Estonian Biodatabase, the Dutch Depression and Anxiety Research Database, FinnGen, the Japanese Biodatabase, and deCode, and found that some of these results could be replicated

Modern human smoking risk sites are associated with Neanderthal genes

Associate Professor Michael Dannemann, the paper's first author, said that the findings suggest that some genes brought by Neanderthals greatly increased the risk of smoking in modern humans, and although the phenotypic effects of these genes on Neanderthals are not yet clear, these results provide interesting candidates for further functional testing and help us better understand the unique biological characteristics

Professor Stefan Gold, the study's corresponding author, said the significant association of Neanderthal genes with modern human smoking and drinking habits may help unravel the evolutionary origins

He also said that some anthropological studies have found that the higher tolerance of human hunter-gatherers to these tobacco and alcohol substances has some social benefits

Neanderthal genes are associated with risk sites formed by modern human sleep patterns

Neanderthals lived in parts of Eurasia for more than 100,000 years, and earlier than the time it took modern humans to leave Africa and reach the rest of the world, and these high-frequency genetic variants from Neanderthals associated with sleep patterns in modern humans suggest that these genetic variants may be beneficial outside of

Overall, this suggests that gene flow between humans and Neanderthals made a significant contribution to human behavioral phenotypes tens of thousands of years ago, but had no direct effect on mental and neurological diseases, and that some Neanderthal genes may have indirectly contributed to human disease risk

Original Source:

Dannemann， M.