New evidence suggests Neanderthals or Denisovans (another extinct near-human species) may be to blame for introducing a variant of this disease — specifically a cancer-causing strain called HPV 16 — to humans.
Recent evidence in genetics have found that humans had sex with Neanderthals and Denisovans many times in our history. “In those times, there was no safe sex, everything was transmitted,” Ville Pimenoff, a genetics researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncoloy in Spain says. [...]
But it does tell us a lot more about human history, and can give us insight on how exposure to disease has shaped human evolution. STDs have been around since the dawn of humanity. Herpes may have first infected our ancestors more than a million years ago. Syphilis has been around since at least the Middle Ages. It’s possible STDs are what encouraged humans to stick to monogamous pairings. [...]
Pimenoff’s study also raises questions about what happened to the Neanderthals. If we contracted HPV from them, what did they get from us? It’s possible that humans spread diseases that brought about their extinction. In April, researchers at Cambridge and Oxford Brookes universities published a paper that suggested Neanderthals may have been particularly susceptible to germs that cause stomach ulcers and herpes.
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