A gene variant that helps protect people from HIV infection likely originated in people who lived during the span of time between the Stone Age and the Viking Age, a new study of thousands of genomes reveals.
"It turns out that the variant arose in one individual who lived in an area near the Black Sea between 6,700 and 9,000 years ago," Simon Rasmussen, a bioinformatics expert at the University of Copenhagen and co-senior author of the study, said in a statement. The variant must have been helpful for something else in the past, since HIV in humans is less than a century old.
