The invention of farming brought humans and animals into much closer contact and humans likely evolved more robust immune systems to fend off infections that the animals passed on. But scientists may have overestimated the impact farming had in shaping the human immune system, because tests on the hunter-gatherer’s DNA found that he already carried mutations that boost the immune system to tackle various nasty bugs. Some live on in modern Europeans today. “Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to ﬁnd,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. “Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong.”
What did scientists assume about the hunter-gatherer’s immune system before the DNA tests of this study?
The invention of farming had a significant impact on its development Hunter-gatherers had highly developed immune systems Europeans had stronger immune systems than other populations It was very similar to the immune systems of Neanderthals