Between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals bundled up before the latter disappeared from existence.
We probably didn’t feel their pain then, but about 0.4 percent of Britons probably feel it now, thanks to a genetic gift from those extinct hominids.
A genetic variant that can be traced back to Neanderthals, but still present in about 0.4 percent of modern humans in Britain, can make pain feel even more acute. Of the 362,944 British citizens in the study, those who had that Neanderthal-derived gene were 7 percent more likely to report at least one symptom of pain., compared to those without the gene.
The authors suggest that this translates into feeling someone’s typical pain. 8.5 years older than him. Age was correlated with more pain experiences in the study population.
Hugo Zeberg is the first author and researcher of the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Karolinska Institute. He says Reverse As the gene is not terribly common in Europe, only about one percent of Europeans likely have it. Zeberg and his team came to that conclusion using data collected by the UK Biobank study.
However, follow-up experiments using data from the 1000 Genome Project suggest that 10 percent of East Asians may also have that gene derived from Neanderthal, and about 40 percent from “some populations” in Central and South America. South may have it too, says Zeberg.
Those modern humans can feel pain in a way similar to a species that died tens of thousands of years ago because that gene causes minor adjustments in the way the cell sends out a pain signal.
The study was published Thursday in Current biology.
Feeling neanderthal pain The gene that Zeberg and his colleagues focused on is called SCN9A. It encodes an ion channel that allows sodium ions (positively charged atoms) to enter and leave nerve cells in peripheral areas of the body. As the charges within the cell change, a signal is activated that tells the brain that something is wrong.
The difference between the Neanderthal version of that gene and the modern human version is that there are three amino acid substitutions in the Neanderthal gene (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins). All of these changes affect the sensitivity of that ion channel, which the team discovered when they designed ovarian cells from water frogs to express those changes.
Those redesigned cells turned out to have an ion channel that was more likely to activate (open) in the first place. When that happened, the probability of the doors remaining open also increased in tandem.
“Pain is not necessarily a bad thing.”
That small cellular shift is reflected in how people today with those substitutions feel pain. Those with all three substitutions were 7 percent more likely to report symptoms of chest pain, knee pain, or leg pain than those with the human version of the gene.
“You are more ready to initiate a pain signal,” says Zeberg.
Naturally, it’s a bit puzzling that a gene that allows people and Neanderthals to feel more pain would persist for thousands of years. Zeberg says it’s better to think things backwards: if we had lost the ability to feel pain, we could actually be in trouble.
There are modern cases of people who have a very rare version of that SCN9A gene that actually loses the ability to feel pain entirely. The NIH notes that it can lead to an accumulation of broken bone injury injuries that “often lead to reduced life expectancy.”
“Pain is not necessarily a bad thing,” says Zeberg. And while these pain experiences linked to Neanderthal genes are not out of the ordinary, they do suggest that Neanderthals had a pretty difficult time of it.
What else did the Neanderthals leave us? – In May 2010, scientists were able to fully sequence the Neanderthal genome. That not only confirmed that ancient humans and Neanderthals understood this, but it also showed a number of ways that their DNA lives within us.
In 2011, the 23andMe consumer genetics company began offering “ideas of Neanderthal descent.” This allows people to see how many of their gene-based traits actually come from Neanderthals. Samantha Esselman, the scientist who wrote that report, said Reverse that some human traits are linked to the DNA of Neanderthals, including the possibility of experiencing a “suspension”, less likely to experience fear of heights, and more likely to be a hoarder.
That said, connecting genetics and behavior is not a exact Sciences.
“It’s kind of difficult taking those very modern terms and modern ideas and trying to make that connection to Neanderthal DNA and how that might influence their behavior,” Esselman said.
It’s tempting to think about what Neanderthals gave us and what that says about how we behave. Perhaps these studies also help us understand why Neanderthals behaved in a certain way as well. In the future, we will likely continue to learn how Neanderthal DNA affects modern health.
We already know that they would self-medicate by chewing the bark containing a compound similar to aspirin. If these results tell us anything, it’s that they had a good reason to do it, right in their DNA.
Summary: The Nav1.7 sodium channel is crucial for the generation and conduction of impulses in the peripheral pain pathways. [1]. In Neanderthals, the Nav1.7 protein carried three amino acid substitutions (M932L, V991L, and D1908G) relative to modern humans. We express Nav1.7 proteins with all combinations of these substitutions and study their electrophysiological effects. While the individual amino acid substitutions do not affect ion channel function, the complete Neanderthal variant bearing all three substitutions, as well as the combination of V991L with D1908G, shows reduced inactivation, suggesting that the peripheral nerves were more sensitive. to painful stimuli in Neanderthals than in modern humans. We show that due to Neanderthal gene flow, all three Neanderthal substitutions are found in 0.4% of current Britons, where they are associated with increased sensitivity to pain.
