Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yacolp.co.

That's Y-A-K-U-L-T-C-O-J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

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 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. Rajeeve 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.

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