There’s evidence that a reason COVID-19 spreads can be traced all the way back to the cavemen.

Under a new theory, modern man’s interbreeding with Neanderthals may have left certain populations with a genetic predisposition for contracting COVID in a way that defied initial expectations.

The new outbreak in South Africa appears to strengthen this theory.

In an article for The Epoch Times, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. reports on the work of Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University. A mechanical engineer, Bejan defied the popular opinion of medical experts by suggesting the spread of the COVID-causing coronavirus would go east to west from China and not into Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s because, he wrote, “people on the globe are not uniformly susceptible to the coronavirus.”

In an academic paper, Bejan suggested that the homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa and interbred with Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago inherited a genetic predisposition to the coronavirus that is evident now.

“Jet travel enabled today’s coronavirus to travel rapidly,” Bonner notes, “but it did so using an ancient map subconsciously followed by humans during their first encounters with Neanderthals.”

Bonner further lays out Bejan’s premise:

The key to understanding this development lies not in the virus itself, but in people’s genetically-determined susceptibility to it, Bejan explains. On their migration path from east Africa, homo sapiens had three interbreeding events with Neanderthals and other hominids who inhabited Europe, the Middle East and Asia. “The percentage of Neanderthal DNA in humans increased stepwise through each interbreeding event, from zero in Sub-Saharan Africans to roughly four percent in East Asians,” Bejan says. Today, the maximum amount of Neanderthal DNA found in humans is four percent, and these are the people who are at greatest risk from COVID-19.

This would explain why, against expectations, an underdeveloped Sub-Saharan Africa has not been ravaged by COVID. Until now. And even that appears to validate Bejan’s theory.

A new variant of COVID has appeared in South Africa. Its spread there – in a country with a disproportionately higher percentage of people of European and Asian heritage – is unique. Those native to the region who are thus far not substantially affected do not have the Neanderthal DNA thought to be a factor in the spread of the virus.

There’s also research finding that genetic material attributed to Neanderthals also appears to be linked to a much higher need for COVID-related hospitalization and ventilators.

All of this suggests that there’s more to disease control and abatement than listening to the pontifications of medical experts:

In confronting a pandemic, the first thought is to look at the world of medicine to find a cure.  And, sure enough, pharmaceutical giants Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna produced vaccines within an astounding nine months that are already being distributed.  But exploring the pandemic’s spread and human susceptibility leads the inquiring mind elsewhere – to the fields of anthropology, genetics and even physics.

To read all of Bonner’s article – “Ancient Migration Patterns Offer Explanation for Unequal Susceptibility to COVID-19” – on the website of The Epoch Times, click here.

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