This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens weren't the only game in town.

We were just one of several species of hominids roaming the earth like

the Neanderthals in Eurasia. And when our Sapiens ancestors came in contact with

them, they sometimes hooked up, which means many people today of Eurasian descent still carry copies of Neanderthal genes.

But what do those genes do?

Researchers tried to answer that question by examining the modern human genome.

And they found that on average, Neanderthal versions of genes are not active as much

as their modern human counterparts in the brain or the testicles, meaning Neanderthal variants have less influence there.

Possibly the researchers say because those tissues underwent significant changes

since what became modern humans in Neanderthals diverged 700,000 years ago.

Really, our results show that Neanderthal sequences that are present in modern humans aren't

just kind of silent remnants of hybridization that occurred 50,000 years ago, but they really

have widespread measurable impacts on gene expression to this day.

Rajev McCoy, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Washington.

In other words, genes we got from Neanderthals, they play roles in the activation of various

other of our genes, leading to the production of different kinds of proteins.

The studies in the journal cell.

It also turns out that for one gene in particular, if you carry the Neanderthal mutation,

you have slightly lower risk of schizophrenia,

and you also have slightly increased height on average.

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