This process has been called the “poison-antidote model” of adaptive introgression: Neanderthals gave Homo sapiens a “poison” by exposing them to a novel pathogen, but also the “antidote” in the form of introgressed gene variants that confer resistance to the pathogen.[61] As a result, many of the Neanderthal gene variants that remain in our genome relate specifically to our immune response.
