Neanderthal gene ‘caused up to a million Covid deaths’

A single Neanderthal gene is likely to be responsible for up to a million Covid deaths, an Oxford academic has claimed.

Dr James Davies, from the university’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said the number of deaths globally from this genetic variant, which is found in one in six Britons, “is in the hundreds of thousands to a million”, reported The Telegraph.

Which gene is to blame?

The LZTFL1 gene is a Neanderthal gene found on chromosome three. The Times said the genetic tweak was the result of what “may have been the most disastrous one-night stand in the history of humanity”. It happened 60,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East, when “two humans, slightly different in looks and stature, met and had sex”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Some 40,000 years after the last Neanderthal died out, the genetics “sown at that one romantic meeting reaped a pandemic whirlwind”, the paper added.

Why did it cause so many deaths?

When scientists compared the genomes of about 2,000 people who had suffered from severe Covid with the same number who did not, one difference stood out.

“It’s a single-letter difference out of three billion,” Davies said, who was appearing at the Cheltenham Science Festival. “This tiny section of DNA doubles your risk of dying from Covid.”

His team found that the gene changes how a cell behaves when the Sars-CoV-2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptor on a human cell, said The Telegraph. It means that cells in the lungs are slower to launch defences in response to infection.

“What this high risk variant does is it creates a new signal that tells that gene to stay on for slightly too long in response to infection,” Davies said. “And so they stay in this state where they’re highly specialised, and they're prone to infection for longer.”

Approximately 15% of Europeans have the Neanderthal form of the gene, and around 60% of South Asians do.

This is not the first time that Neanderthal genes have been linked with more grave Covid symptoms. In October 2020, a study concluded that genes passed down from our Neanderthal ancestors may increase our risk of contracting a more severe form of Covid-19.

Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that mysteriously died out around 40,000 years ago. The Daily Mail said that, although they were long thought to be “dim-witted and brutish”, in recent years evidence has pointed to a more “sophisticated and multi-talented kind of ‘caveman’”.