Since there’s a bit of Neanderthal in us all

Even as late as pre-March 2020, not many people would be willing to accept, much less admit, that there is a bit of the Neanderthal lurking in modern Homo sapiens.

After all, Neanderthals disappeared off the face of the earth 40,000 years ago, once we humans moved out of Africa and got cracking with this civilisation thing. But not before a few of us and a few of them hooked up in the 5,400 years we co-existed on Earth, leading to almost all non-Africans today having a smidgen of Neanderthal in their bodies.

And thank goodness for those early liaisons too, considering that due to them, a gene lurking somewhere in our chromosomes is apparently doing yeoman service fending off the coronavirus, according to new research.


This is not surprising considering that if a few of us are less susceptible to the stomach bug Hpylori, it is also due to Neanderthal genes. Of course, there is also another gene in our DNA from the same Neanderthal pool that actually makes its carriers more susceptible to the virus, but at least there are some good-guy genes too.

As those extinct hominids provided a section of us humans with a built-in safeguard against Covid-19, it was rather unfair of Joe Biden to call the lifting of mask requirements in Texas and Mississippi ‘Neanderthal thinking’. Homo idioticus thinking would be more apt.