A different kind of ancient history: 50,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Bones Have Remains of Human Viruses, Scientists Find
The preliminary analysis is a first step in testing the theory that infectious diseases played a role in Neanderthals’ extinction

Scientists have detected remnants of three types of viruses in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. The findings, researchers say, are a first step in testing the theory that viral infections could have played a role in the extinction of Neanderthals.

In a paper posted to the preprint site bioRxiv, the researchers detected fragments of adenovirus (which causes cold-like illnesses), herpesvirus (linked to cold sores) and papillomavirus (HPV) in Neanderthal genome data. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.

If confirmed, the new findings would be the oldest human viruses ever recovered, setting a record previously held by a 31,000-year-old adenovirus, reports New Scientist’s James Woodford.

“This DNA contains… a mixture of various DNAs, from the Neanderthal individual themselves, plus bacteria, fungus and viruses that might have infected this individual,” Marcelo Briones, a co-author of the new study and a genome researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil, writes in an email to Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. “We show that the degree of such changes in the viral genome reads recovered are consistent with the age of the Neanderthal bones, thus showing that they are not present-day contaminants.”

“Taken together, our data indicate that these viruses might represent viruses that really infected Neanderthals,” he tells New Scientist.