The research is still on the preprint server and has not yet received full review and approval. It identifies portions of ancient viral genomes that the team identified in Neanderthal DNA. But these ancient viral fragments are inert and cannot be retransmitted, so they pose no risk to modern humans.

Detail

The remains in question were found in 2022 in a cave next to another cave where Neanderthal remains were previously found. Analysis of bones and teeth revealed the relationship between several individuals, meaning that this was a single family.

While it is clear that the viruses found in Neanderthal genomes are very old, they are far from the oldest examples of viruses that science has found, given that Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. Evidence of viruses in vertebrates dates back approximately 300 million years. In 2019, another team of researchers identified evidence of bone disease in a 290-million-year-old amniote, which they presented as possibly the “earliest indirect evidence for viruses in the fossil record.”

This time, the researchers looked for microscopic evidence of viruses in the long-dead remains, namely the DNA damage they caused. They then compared the results to three types of double-stranded DNA viruses: adenovirus (often associated with the common cold), herpesvirus (often called herpes), and papillomavirus (aka HPV). They found traces of all three viruses in NeanderthalsThis suggests that ancient hominins were infected throughout their lives.

This DNA contains different DNA from Neanderthals, as well as a mixture of bacteria, fungi and viruses that may have infected this person. We show that the extent of such changes in the recovered viral genome is consistent with the age of Neanderthal bones; This shows that these are not modern pollutants.
– says Marcelo Briones, genome researcher from the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil and lead author of the paper.

The team also created evolutionary trees that showed the viruses were not “non-human” and ruled out the possibility that the viruses passed to Neanderthals through other mammals that ate their remains, for example. In other words, the data obtained made the research team think that the viruses were actually pathogens that transmitted to Neanderthals and could remain in the body throughout life.

It’s also more likely that ancient Homo sapiens infected Neanderthals than the other way around, Briones says.