Perhaps it was the adventure of one of the most disastrous nights in human history. Sixty thousand years ago, in the Middle East, two humans, slightly different in appearance and stature, met and had sex.
And in the last two years, as a direct result of this connection between two of our ancestors, one of them a Neanderthal, several hundred thousand people have died.
Scientists yesterday spoke of how it seemed that this single fateful act had given many of us a genetic adjustment that doubles our risk of suffering a severe Covid, which they estimated caused up to a million pandemic deaths.
James Davies identified the genome looking for differences in 2,000 people who suffered severe Covid and 2,000 people who did not.
“If this dinner date between humans and Neanderthals had gone wrong… We would have had hundreds of