Bbc Inside Science

Can Inuit people survive the Arctic cold thanks to deep past liaisons with another species? Adam Rutherford talks to geneticist Rasmus Nielsen who says that's part of the answer. His team's research has identified a particular section of the Inuit people's genome which looks as though it originally came from a long extinct population of humans who lived in Siberia 50,000 years ago. The genes concerned are involved in physiological processes advantageous to adapting to the cold. The conclusion is that at some point, the ancestors of Inuits interbred with members of this other species of human (known as the Denisovans) before people arrived in Greenland.Also in the programme: The woodlice which are made either female or male because of a gene that once belonged a bacterium. The gene came from a dead microbe and was incorporated by chance into the woodlouse genome. This is the first known instance of the invention of an animal sex chromosome through bacterial donation. We talk to Richard Cordaux of the Universit