GENETIC changes that helped our ancestors survive the cold may be protecting modern populations against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
This hypothesis has emerged from a reconstruction of DNA mutations that occurred during our species’ march out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. It illustrates how understanding our evolutionary past can shed light on patterns of disease today.
“Our evolutionary history has a huge effect on modern health,” says Douglas Wallace at the University of California in Irvine, who led the research. His team studied mitochondrial DNA sequences from populations across the globe. By matching alterations in the DNA to past evolutionary events they…
