THE ancestors of today’s Europeans interbred with another early human species. That’s one explanation being proposed to explain the discovery of a peculiar stretch of DNA in some modern Europeans.
As part of an extensive gene-mapping programme, researchers at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, have been searching for places in the human genome where chunks of DNA containing many genes get turned back-to-front. One of these inversions, on chromosome 17, caught their eye because it turns up in about 20 per cent of Europeans, yet is rare in Africans and almost absent in Asians.
When the researchers looked at the…
