How do neanderthal genes affect your health? (With Geneticist Laurits Skov) 

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I'm always happy to find another thing to blame my flaws on!

"Stephan Milo, neanderthal prostate" is a phrase that 100% goes on a business card, period

"I think it's easier to explain all the boinking we did if there was a little bit of chat..." You've got a talent for humanizing evolution and making genetic science feel relatable, good job man!

I only found your channel recently and have binge-watched everything. Please hurry up and make more videos to sate my self-absorbed sense of entitlement.

Tibet mentioned!! I am both Tibetan and Sherpa, and it's so interesting to see this. Hopefully, someday I get to do a deep dive in my genes, too.

Beautiful thumbnail as always Stefan, very memeable, thank you for blessing us on this day

We can't blame Gérard Depardieu on the Neanderthals.

Let me tell you how refreshing it is to look at the about page for a RU-vid channel and actually fine USEFUL information about the presenter and their credentials! Thank you for that, I wish more people gave the information we need to evaluate the information we are viewing.

What a great discussion with a very personable,and knowledgeable, guest! Loved it! All the best Jules 💕👍

Excellent video, as always. Your dedication to academic integrity and your hilarious sense of humor are a breath of fresh air. Appreciation for Mr. Skov's expertise, as well. Thank you for posting.

Very interesting video, as yours always are, Stephan. I get a little tinge of excitement when I see you have put a new video out: always informative, and with a nice touch of humor. I do miss the spoon however 😂

Fantastic video this, great shout getting a geneticist in and making the video call flow really well (i imagine there must have been quite a hit of editing required on your part there)

I thought this was like a 6-7 minute video when it finished. Amazing job( as always )stefan

Thank you so much for not using click baiting titles. It's great to know what I'm getting from the title. Instead of, "There's something strange about Neanderthal DNA" etc..

Been waiting for new Stefan Milo content 🙌🙌🙌👌👌 it's a Christmas miracle

Love this channel. Great to be early to an upload

Keep up the great work man! Absolutely love your channel.

You're my favourite thing to watch these days Stefan ❤

another stellar episode - hope to see you again real soon!

Excellent. The largest obvious impact from Neanderthal genes is in the immune system with the HLA-B27 gene. It codes for a robust immune system. However, it has a problem. Bacteria evolved along with Neanderthals to cause a susceptibility to severe arthitis (reactive arthritis, anklyosing spondylitis and others). It doesn't cause the diseases. It does lead to a susceptibility if infected by the offending organisms. More interesting is the huge variation in vision, and in CYP enzymes. Whether these are of Neaderthal or simply ancient human origin from the north of Europe is as yet unknown. The CYP enzymes can with the right mix lead to vastly higher levels of pregnenolone (and sex hormones in general). And this leads to more robust nerve sheaths and vastly faster nerve speed, higher IQ, and quicker responses. This appears to be related to improved night vision in low light. Other genetics leads to vastly better night color vision, much increased blue vision (and sensitivity), and more. It also leads to much faster repsonse to motion in the visual field and differences in repsonse to flicker. And no - none of this is in the science literature - yet. The Neanderthals had huge changes in brain structure related to vision, and hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to the far north and low light for long periods which strongly favored adaptation to those conditions. The high altitude genes come from three (maybe four) separate populations. Denisovan for the Tibetan version. Ethiopia for a Sapien version. And the Andes (e.g. Peru) for a different Sapien descendant version. Clearly Neaderthals had hugely advanced technologies for the time (evidenced by the pitch they used to cement their weapons), which require high temperatures to produce - that we have yet to reproduce today. Passing this on (along with nmany other things) required language. Erectus which preceeded Neaderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens had advanced tech as well. They had to have sailed to get to some places they went. That moves sailing and the tech for that back to a million years ago. That kind of tech all but requires language. Though there is a sapien bias toward the idea that Neaderthals, and Denisovans went extinct and there was limited breeding and interaction, the amount of their genes in us argues that rather than limited interaction, what really happened was that the severe events from major volcanic eruptions impact on climate 74,000 years ago, 39,000 years ago, and up to 12,000 years ago severely stressed and nearly killed off all of the homo lineages. They then all simply merged. And the result is sapiens sapiens made up of the sapiens from before, some remaining erectus, neaderthal, at least three different denisovan species, an unknown other speices from europe, as many as seven distinct strains from Africa, and possibly others. We never were truly seperate species in the gneetic sense. And we weren't all that genetically different. We were in some cases culturally and tribally quite different and adapated to very different climates. But when push came to shove, that geographic speciation fell by the wayside.

Stephan, nice to see you come out of your shell. Always informative and getting more and more entertaining. I trust you won't let the show get between you and you. Cheers.

I've long suspected you had a more neandertalish prostate. I think it was the plastic spoon that gave it away. Definitely a marker. Great video as always! Thank you so much for this. I learn a ton from your videos.

Best thumbnail on the channel Thank you Stefan

my favorite youtuber is back!!!!! love ur vids

Hi stefan. Love your presentations. Bot your book. Keep truckin'

I always eagerly await content from you, just yesterday I checked your channel to see if you had posted anything new, but then, to open RU-vid today and see this stunning thumbnail... GLORIOUS.

This is neat! Thanks Stefan & Laurits Skov!

An incredible video as always. Fascinating stuff Stefan!

The internet people say a lot of strange things about neanderthal genetics in humans, so thank you for setting the record straight!! you are doing the lord's work

im really proud to have Neanderthal DNA - they were an amazing species - strong bones, bigger brains than cro-magnons - whats not to love?

Thank you!! Excellent work- watched all your work. Really coming into your own style. Thank you editor! ♥️🇨🇦♥️

Thanks very much for this upload ! Very interesting like all your docus, and still lot of fun to watch.

my jeans are usually tight

Thank you for your videos. I always love seeing something new from you, constantly learning so much about where we came from. PS I am very much looking for to your Whitesands video! Edit after actually finishing this video... I watched another history video recently discussing a genetic resistance in some Europeans to the black plague. This was also connected to people who seem to be resistant to contracting HIV. They also made a loose connection to resistance to COVID. Could this be all connected to Neanderthal DNA? I can't wait to see wait DNA tells us next.

I think this is my first time commenting on one of your videos! This was fascinating & makes me want to go down a proper genetics rabbit hole.

You always have the best videos. Thanks for this fascinating content!

I’m so early Australopithecus would be giving me a high five.

The photo of Gerard Depardieu when mentioning Neanderthal was priceless

Love your vids, Stefan. Keep on keeping on.

Another great one Milo!

YAY more Stefan :)

That thumbnail kills me. Lookin like a hairy thumb of ancient knowledge.

This was a great watch

Fresh as always... love your style 😊

I hope im not the ONLY person to laugh hysterically at the thumb upon reading the title...im sorry im only human....but i laughed till i hurt.

Always great content.❤❤❤

Nice vid as always

2% sounds small but it’s actually enormous. You have 64 great-great-great grandparents(subject to cousin marriage or closer inbreeding). They were all born 100-150 years before you and each contribute less than 2%. Archeological evidence suggests there haven’t been full blooded Neanderthals for 10s of thousands of years. 2% suggests a much larger amount of interbreeding back in the day than is comfortably imaginable.

Came to watch but then realized I should wait for my fiancée because she loved your videos when I introduced her to them

Great subject! I really enjoyed this.

Yeaaaah New Stefan Milo vid is always a good omen.

For 15:30, Id say since the info came out it's been a hypothesis that they were better at fighting plant toxins. There were many genes which let some of us pick up only a fragment. They could uptake, process, and let down those sorts of things quickly which is great until one of their human relatives only has the genes for one of those functions. It becomes frailty.

Very cool video 👍

Another fascinating and entertaining video. Stefan, these are my favorites! Kudos too to Mr Skov -- who may have the fastest speech I've ever heard (outside of those rapid-fire tv commercials from some years back, and also a wonderful movie about high school debaters called Rocket Science). Please make more of these!

Loved this Stefan Thankyou

Laurits and Stefan are a charismatic pair!

Fascinating video, thank you!

stefan, you never miss. banger after banger

14:46 I haven’t seen all of the literature on the subject, but my understanding is that the racial disparity in disease survival rates has more to do with environmental factors on different continents. Europeans have some of the best immune systems due to all of the selection pressure from medieval plagues. Same with China. It’s the same reason Native Americans were affected much more by European diseases in the early 1600s; their gene pool had no prior exposure because their culture was more isolated and farmed less (less opportunity for animal to human transfer of disease). It’s also why Africans are more resilient to malaria and some other tropical diseases but may be more susceptible to some many Eurasian diseases

Hi Stefan! I remember Robert Sapolsky in one of his lectures saying that the FOXP2 gene in humans made vocalisations more complex. Birds and other animals also share this gene. So it could make sense if the neanderthals had a less structured communication? Great video!

Great vid. Subscribed!

Learned alot. Thanks!

Does the gene 'reduce your risk' as you said, or is it more correct to say the gene is correlated with a lower risk?

Ron Perlman has a LOT more than 2%.

Nothing like a good deep dive! 😊

Yay! He's back!

Didn't catch your genetics presentor's name, but congrats to both of you for an entertaining and informative presentation. Two things your presentor (perhaps wisely) side-stepped : 1) the ~21,000 human gene number issue is far, far, far beyond complicated, as any eukaryote's 'single' gene is comprised of numerous coding 'exons', which, depending on mRNA processing, provide a mechanism for 'one' gene to encode multiple protien products (of different functions?) from the same DNA template due to a process called 'alternative' mRNA splicing. mRNA-reassociation kinetics studies suggest the human genome can actually produce as many as 250,000 different protein products. 2) 98% of both genomes are non-coding, and the vast majority of base-pair differences between the sibling (opinion: hate to use that word, we're way closer than that) species reside in those regions of unknown (presumably regulatory) function. Interspecies DNA sequence alterations affect the actual peptide sequence of

Lost it when you phased to Gerard Depardieu 😂😂

This is why I love what science brings to light, we all may not have the best chances genetically, but where we are born in makes such significant changes to how we live.

Fascinating. Great vid

Super interesting. My 23&me says I have more neanderthal DNA than 85% of their customer base.

Very interesting! Just it would be more precise to refer to "Neanderthal variants" here, not "Neanderthal genes", we all have these genes, just different variants of them. Btw I remember there was a family in my country with young brothers (under age 35) that had very severe Covid19, it was found a genetic variant they both carried was the reason for this, I don't know if this was a Neanderthal variant or not.

Man I love your videos.

Very interesting episode.

With the FOXP2 gene, Laurits seems to imply that the modern family with notable variation in this gene was able to understand language and use words but just struggled to form sentences so, with Neanderthals having such a similar gene to us and with what we know about the way they lived, I think they must have had language even if their language was perhaps vastly different from our own.

Rarely do I ever laugh at a thumbnail.

Stefan, Congratulations on your Neanderthal prostate, and many happy returns !

Award winning thumb nail. ☝️ Love ye man!!

I am Emberá Native American and my results came in at 3.1% even though I am also mixed blood so it’s not as high as full-bloods at 4-5% but not as low as Spaniards at 1-2%, so yea it’s pretty high for the average

Great video, Stefan. You know, speaking about neanderthals, I was thinking that a breakdown of the film "Quest for fire" (1981) would be super interesting. There are very few movies depicting human prehistory, and I rather like this one, but is also super wierd and I don't know how accurate it is. I'm sure you would have interesting stuff to say about it. Kudos and keep up the good job.

Hahaha the thumbnail. Great video as always!!

On the edge of my seat again Stefan, learned a bit more about my genetic past, think I'm good for prostate, the doctor confirmed that one. As for the nether regions, b@lls not so good. Thanks mate.

Hands down, best prostate on YT! I don't care what the haters say

This channel hasn't been the same since the loss of the spoon mic. Really, that's the only major change to the channel but it's not the same nonetheless!

Fascinating! Thank'ee!

Milo… you are a wonderful human being.

I have shovel teeth, this comes from My Father's Side, I've actually asked my mom if I could feel her teeth and that is what normal Sapient teeth are like,, I highly doubt that I've never had a broken bone and that I have shovel teeth because of a meager 2%,, some of us have a lot more. And in regards to never having a broken bone I have done things that doctors are questioning why I'm alive and yet no broken bones no hematoma and I heal from things that should kill normal people,, I buggered up my knee they wanted to do surgery I said no, here I am a few years later with a perfectly healed knee. Yeah I might be a little bit Ginger and I'm very very passionate but I don't think those are bad things at all😊

Its very likely that human Neanderthal hybrids were like some fish hybrids, some fish hybridize and for example only the females between species A and species B are fertile but only when species B is the male and Species A is the female while all other combos fail to be fertile.

This was so good, I had a good laugh!

Thank you for this video which added to my meagre knowledge of ancient genomics Mr Top Notch Prostate.

you need a neanderthal carnivore diet Stefan

Smash that like button for our beautiful boy Stefan Milo!!!

Your videos are excellent

Fascinating stuff, and theres still so much to know about neanderthals!

What is truly overwhelming for those of us still around who go back to the paleolithic of computer punch cards and endless perforated yellow tape, is the absolutely mind blowing advance in computing power without which modern genetics especially would still only be a few steps from Mendel's garden of wrinkled peas. It's incredible how we now take it as a normal, natural and essential part of everyday life. And to think that most of that potential capacity was contained and then expressed in possibly a single gene for language is simply mind boggling. And now computers are taking on a life of their own perhaps way beyond our capacity to comprehend and control! We may become, if it hasn't happened already, to them as neanderthals were once scornfully considered by us.

1980: "I bet there'll be flying cars in the future." 2023: Double chin clikbait to smuggle in lessons on Neanderthal genes.

stefan youre the only youtuber i know who has researchers making absurd jokes about butts by the end of your interviews, you're doing god's work

You and your videos are sodding brilliant

thumbnail shows one sapiens chin and one neanderthaliensis chin