{"id":110780,"date":"2020-08-03T03:22:48","date_gmt":"2020-08-03T10:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/humans-might-be-so-sickly-because-we-evolved-to-avoid-a-single-devastating-disease"},"modified":"2020-08-03T03:22:48","modified_gmt":"2020-08-03T10:22:48","slug":"humans-might-be-so-sickly-because-we-evolved-to-avoid-a-single-devastating-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/humans-might-be-so-sickly-because-we-evolved-to-avoid-a-single-devastating-disease","title":{"rendered":"Humans Might Be So Sickly Because We Evolved to Avoid a Single Devastating Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/humans-might-be-so-sickly-because-we-evolved-to-avoid-a-single-devastating-disease2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors evolved a simple trick that could have helped thwart a major infectious disease. It probably saved our skins, but the change was far from a perfect solution.<\/p>\n<p>New research has uncovered evidence that mutations arising between 600,000 and 2 million years ago were part of a complex of adaptations that may have inadvertently made us prone to inflammatory diseases and even other pathogens.<\/p>\n<p>An international team of researchers compared around a thousand human genomes with a few from our extinct cousins, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/neanderthals\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Neanderthals\">Neanderthals<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/denisovans\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Denisovans\">Denisovans<\/a>, to fill in missing details on the evolution of a family of chemicals that coat the human body\u2019s cells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors evolved a simple trick that could have helped thwart a major infectious disease. It probably saved our skins, but the change was far from a perfect solution. New research has uncovered evidence that mutations arising between 600,000 and 2 million years ago were part of a complex [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}