Tibetans’ Surprising Inheritance
24th December 2014
Tibetans live in a region that averages more than 4,000 meters above sea level. (Not for nothing is it called the roof of the world.) How did they come to be able to cope with their extreme environs? Some researchers in China and the United States think they might know, and their findings were published Wednesday in Nature. By sequencing DNA from a group of Tibetans and comparing the code to other gene databases, the researchers have discovered that Tibetans are inheritors of an ancient trait that helps regulate the oxygenation in their blood. But surprisingly, this trait did not arise in Homo sapiens. Rather, it came from another group of humans, the Denisovans—mysterious, little-known hominid cousins that died out some 40,000 years ago.