Hello, and welcome to today's episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. I'm really glad that you could join me today because we're going to have fun today, we're going to be combining some of my favorite subjects history, modern medicine, and a little bit of speculation mixed in. So stay tuned. This one should be a lot of fun. 

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So in today's episode by the title, you saw the word Neanderthal and you go, “What does that have to do with ankylosing spondylitis at all?” Well, I wondered the same thing. And then I was directed towards a few interesting articles and I started reading them and it really was a very interesting hypothesis. So about 30,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years. What we would know as the modern homosapien came wandering out of the continent of Africa as they were migrating north. And as they got into the colder climates, they walked right into and head on confrontations with an ancestor of theirs that was already living there. But that hadn't changed in the hundreds of thousands of years. The Neanderthal was they got there, what you would expect took place, conflict, fighting, death as one type of species tried to basically conquer the other. Which one was going to win? Well, it ended up obviously being humans, you know,Homo sapiens. But did we walk away with a gift or maybe a curse From Neanderthals? Well, let's look at that. It's an interesting hypothesis or interesting series of debates that had gone on around this. So I was directed to a website called Everyday Battle, where there was an article entitled How a weird fetish among our ancestors led to Ankylosing Spondylitis. And so I started to delve into this article and found it to be really interesting, and I'll have a link down below what the studies are showing where now this is from some information that came out in the 2013, 2012 somewhere back in that area. But it was based upon looking at the DNA of Neanderthals and (modern day)humans and what they found in that and what may have carried over to us as modern humans. Studies suggest that Neanderthal genetics may be responsible for autoimmune diseases in modern humans. The author discusses a documentary called Decoding Neanderthals and in that documentary, they talked about discovering in the ancient DNA of these Neanderthals, the HLA alleles, and one particular HLA, HLA-B27 is the main genetic marker that's used to diagnose Ankylosing Spondylitis. It's found in 95% of...