Emily is a health news writer based in London, United Kingdom. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Durham University and a master's degree in clinical and therapeutic neuroscience from Oxford University. She has worked in science communication, medical writing and as a local news reporter while undertaking journalism training.
This has left a telltale signature in the genomes of modern humans today, and this Neanderthal DNA impacts our health in myriad ways. Experts told Live Science that some of that could be chance. But it's also possible that genes from Neanderthal males were incompatible with the female Homo sapiens carrying them. That would mean only female hybrids were able to reproduce.The vanishing"Y" The Y chromosome is one of two types of sex chromosomes in humans.
"The amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans nowadays is relatively low so it could have been lost by drift," Fernando Mendez, lead study author, who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, told ABC News. In other words, it's not that Neanderthal DNA was less"fit" than modern human DNA from an evolutionary perspective but rather that it was just lost over time.
If modern women who interbred with Neanderthals had fewer boys than other couples, then systematically the boys that live are likely to have fewer boys, Mendez told ABC News. This hypothesis aligns with an old theory called"Haldane's rule," which suggests that if breeding between genetically-different populations leads to infertility, it is likely to be in the sex — in this case male—that carries two different sex chromosomes.
Scientists don't know why this happened, Martin Petr, a co-senior study author and researcher and programmer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told Live Science.
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