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A DNA study leads researchers to place humanity’s low pain thresholds on the Neanderthals.
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The team believes that, thousands of years ago, interbreeding caused the development of key traits that were then passed on to modern humans.
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As the study of Neanderthals continues, additional features join the growing list of similarities between the species and modern humans.
Not a big fan of getting shots at the doctor or getting tattoos? Your low pain threshold may just be a factor of your genetics, and long-held genetics.
Researchers in Europe say they have linked ancient Neanderthal breeding genetics to low thresholds for specific types of pain in modern humans. They published the findings in Biology of Communication.
“We were learning more and more about what we inherited from him [Neanderthals] as a result of interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago,” said Kaustubh Adhikari, co-author of the study and researcher at University College London Genetics, Evolution & Environment, in a statement. “Our findings suggest that Neanderthals may have been more sensitive to certain types of pain, but more research is needed for us to understand why this is the case, and whether these genetic variations of evolution were advantageous in a way specific.”
Since the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced 15 years ago, researchers have worked to connect modern humans to these archaic ancestors in various ways. So far, scientists have found links from Neanderthal DNA to everything from modern nose shapes to our propensity for disease.
In the recent pain study, researchers investigated three variations in the SCN9A gene, and reported increased sensitivity to pain among humans carrying all three variants. The SCN9A gene builds sodium channels that help nerve cells communicate—in particular, it helps cells alert the nervous system to a painful threat from damaged tissue.
The authors say that the three gene variants were associated with a lower pain threshold for wetting the skin after previous exposure to mustard oil (which was used to sensitize the area), but were not associated with any changes in pain tolerance caused by heat or pressure. Carrying all three variants increased pain sensitivity compared to carrying only one.
The sodium channel was actually recognized as “crucial” in the scope of pain pathways in 2020 by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. They then suggested that Neanderthals experienced a greater sensitivity to pain compared to modern humans, thanks to the SCN9A gene.
But the previous study did not fully explore the mechanical aspects of the increased pain sensitivity—the prick is stronger than pressure or heat. This recent study proposes that those with the three Neanderthal variants have more sensitized sensory neurons, and are therefore able to alert the body to these poke-induced pains.
“We have shown how a variation in our genetic code can change how we perceive pain,” said Pierre Faux, first author and researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille and the University of Toulouse, in a news release, “including genes that modern humans acquired from Neanderthals.”
They also found that the three Neanderthal variants are more common in populations with higher percentages of Native American ancestry. The study says the variants are largely absent in Europeans and common in Latin Americans, thanks to what they call “population bottlenecks that occurred during the initial occupation of the Americas.”
The team now wants to know if this lower threshold of pain offered some kind of evolutionary benefit, or if an increase in pain sensitivity when placed is just another piece of the Neanderthal story that lives on in modern humans.
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