Article content

A pair of genes that control how the body burns fat for warmth in the cold, which would have helped prehistoric humans as they spread out of Africa into Siberia and eventually the Americas, came from interbreeding with Denisovans, an extinct species of human.

This is the conclusion of new genetic research on Greenland Inuit with low European mixing, living in villages on the coast of Baffin Bay, who almost universally exhibit a highly unusual genetic signature in two specific genes.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Genes that helped humans survive in Arctic came from interbreeding with now-extinct species: study Back to video

The discovery raises the remarkable possibility that the success of Inuit over millennia in the frozen Arctic was not solely due to cultural knowledge and technological skills with insulation and nutrition, but was also supported by newly acquired genetic and biological traits.

The finding, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, is the latest example of “archaic introgression,” or the introduction of genetic material into homo sapiens from extinct species in the genus homo, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, often to control things like metabolism or immunity. Another major finding in this emerging field, for example, was the discovery that Tibetans have a genetic variant, seemingly taken from Denisovans, that affects the response to hypoxia, or low oxygen due to high altitude.