Modern humans left Africa some 60,000 years ago in the event known as “Out-of-Africa.” In Asia, they coincided with the Denisovans, and that encounter may have led to confrontations and collaborations, but also various crossbreeding. In fact, modern humans retain genetic variants of Denisovan origin in our genome, which are testimony to those initial interactions.
Now, a team led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), and by the UPF Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS), has identified one of the most widespread traces of the genetic heritage of the extinct Denisovans in modern humans.
The teams of Elena Bosch, IBE principal investigator, and of Rubén Vicente, MELIS-UPF principal investigator, have discovered that this genetic adaptation helped ancestral populations of Homo sapiens to adapt to the cold. The variant observed, involved in zinc regulation and with a role in cellular metabolism, could also have predisposed modern humans to psychiatric disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.