Randy NEanderthal may be the culprit of the gene that caused as many as a million people to die from Covid

A single loving Neanderthal may be responsible for infecting a million people who died of Covid with a genetic quirk.

To date, around 6.3 million people worldwide have died from the coronavirus that caused the pandemic.

A large number of people have died due to a relatively common genetic quirk that makes their lungs more susceptible to infection.

Now, the expert, whose research has determined the impact of genetic difference on the lungs, said it came from a single “romantic connection” between a Neanderthal and a member of our own human species.

If this sexual act had not occurred 60,000 years ago, many lives would have been saved from the deadly virus.

Professor James Davies, associate professor of genomics in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, told the Cheltenham Science Festival: “When you think about it, it’s because of a single interspecies relationship and a single offspring.

“And if the dinner date between humans and Neanderthals had gone wrong, we would have had a lot of fun with Covid and would have lost hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

When asked about a rough estimate of exactly how many people died from Covid as a result of 60,000 years of sexual acts, he said, “It ranges from hundreds of thousands to a million.”

The role of Neanderthals in making humans more susceptible to Covid was first revealed in 2020.

But the ancient “romantic connection” behind it was revealed through careful analysis of the “letters” in our genetic code.

DNA is made up of thousands of combinations of the letters A, C, G, and T, which represent four different chemicals.

But people with genetic traits at high risk for Covid have exactly the same 28 letter differences in their genetic code.

This makes it almost certain that they all descended from the same two humans, not the product of many Neanderthals who had sex with many Homo sapiens.

DNA consists of four building blocks called nucleotides: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C)

Professor Davies said at the science festival: “We think it’s one romantic connection, and we know why it’s inherited like these 28 one-letter edit blocks, and you can follow that to the end and it should be.” a single event.

Addressing the festival audience as well, Simon Underdown, a professor of biological anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, said, “When we start thinking about the moment when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens met for dinner, I want you to keep in mind that it was back in time and 60,000 years later, the impact of that meeting on today’s world was Covid’. We see it in more serious forms than

“The average size of the Neanderthal group is estimated to be around 20-25 individuals, so small groups scattered across the continental scale.”

Homo sapiens aside, he described the Neanderthals’ chance of encounter as “unlikely”, which makes the sexual encounter that introduced the Covid-related gene into modern humans extraordinary.

Once Neanderthals and Homo sapiens got together, it is unlikely that they understood that they were separate species, so they were happily intertwined.

The genetic variation that some people now inherit from Neanderthals is linked to a gene called LZTFL1 and is believed to act in lung cells.

These cells develop multiple major proteins on their surface, where the coronavirus can attach and spread to the lungs, causing further damage that could be fatal.

The genetic oddity is more common in people of South Asian descent and may partly explain the high death rate in India during the pandemic.

Professor Davies said: “If you think about it, it comes from a single interspecies relationship and a single child.

“And if the dinner between humans and Neanderthals had gone wrong, we would have been much better off with Covid and would have been killed by hundreds of thousands.”

However, it has also been suggested that Neanderthal genes helped humans by making us smarter, helping us adapt quickly to new diets, and boosting the immune system to fight harmful viruses and bacteria.