Oldest Known Human Viruses Discovered In 50,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Bones

[Warpy]

6. Interesting but it doesn't follow that the viruses were pathogens

or weren't introduced during the 50,000 years the bones sat in the dirt. I do wish them success in teasing out the genome, the structure (including spike proteins) and what the virus might do to living tissue, although they'd be hard pressed to get any Neanderthal living tissue and a lot of viruses are species specific.

I just think it unlikely anything they discover from 50,000 years ago could be considered a proximate cause of species extinction 14,000 years later. I think the culprit for that was the Camparnian Ignimbrite Event, something that devastated the Neandertal habitat
at the time, from the northeastern Mediterranean through central Europe and into parts of Siberia. The stragglers just lacked enough of a diverse DNA pool to survive much longer I doubt crossbreeding with modern humans was all that successful, although it did produce fertile offspring from time to time.