> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-025-02043-4A new study published in the journal GeroScience found that Italian centenarians carry a higher proportion of genetic material from Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) compared to the general population.
>>18240194I can kind of believe it anecdotally. I have no idea why this would be the case other that WHGs were probably a little unique genetically. An old man I know was doing yardwork into his 90s and thinking back, he gives me excess WHG vibes. Blue eyes. Extra hairy. A particular skull and nose shape. Apparently he was athletic and a fast runner in his youth.
>>18240194HGbvlls saving the day once again
>>18240611The longest living people I've seen all tend to be doing farm work, they're happy, without stress, and live with a ton of animals
Interesting. They excluded Sardinians though who are said to have a lot of centenarians, but maybe that's just a myth. Not sure if these results make sense if they don't show other populations with higher WHG live more. Definitely would have been better with whole genomes and ancestry segments over time. Someone who knows statistics should tell us if this is legit.
>>18240649one of my great-grandmothers lived to 96 (1870 to 1966). she left school at 10th grade and then just worked the family farm and raised kids. she smoked alot too lol my uncles and mother have alot of memories of her and apparently she was doing farm chores up until the day she died
>>18240194Why don't Latvians live as much as Italians then?
>>18240950Apparently the longest living person was a smoker too.
>>18240995other factors, you have to compare people in the same environments to be sure to remove all external factors
>>18240995maybe it was selected for in Italy but not in Latvia
>>18240995Because other factors. If you compare in Latvian wide populations, you get more apparent results. Also different origin of WHG dna
>>18242422It might be bogus to some degree considering WHG dna in Italians is just a completely north south cline of how less non European admixture one has
>The obtained results revealed a significant effect only for the WHG ancestry (Table 1, Supplementary File 1: Supplementary Table 4). In particular, the estimated coefficient for WHG was 0.32 (95% CI: 0.07; 0.57, OR=1.38, p-value=1.23e-02), thus indicating that a 1-standard deviation (1-SD) increase in the WHG component is associated with a 38% increase in the odds of being a centenarian. When the analysis was repeated on the female subset, the WHG coefficient remained significant and was even stronger (β=0.87, 95% CI: 0.53; 1.22, OR=2.38, p-value=6.31e-07), thus confirming the association observed in the full dataset. Notably, in the female-specific analysis, the Yamnaya_EBA component also reached statistical significance (β=–0.37, 95% CI: –0.60; –0.14, OR=0.69, p-value=1.67e-03) with an opposite effect to that of WHG, suggesting a negative association between Yamnaya ancestry and the probability of being a centenarian in the female group.Yamnaya bros...
>>18242426Most centenarians in the study lived in central italy, followed by south, the north.Also the samples mostly follow the normal distribution of Italians.It's just a very tiny effect, centenarians in Italy normally have slightly higher WHG, possibly lower steppe, on average. Not a big effect.The study makes it sound like all centenarians are northern-italian like but it's not the case. If anything, the centroid seems around central Italy (as it is in normal Italian average).
>>18242747If they included sardinians in the study, the effect would probably be more pronounced for the Anatolia_N component than the WHG component.
>>18242739It makes sense: Yamnaya ancestry is linked to higher cholesterol levels and therefore a higher risk of heart attack. WHG ancestry is linked to lower cholesterol levels.>An enriched Yamnaya ancestry is linked to a strong build, with tall stature (in agreement with previous studies6,8) and increased hip and waist circumferences, both at genome-wide and region-specific levels, but also to black hairs and high-cholesterol concentrations when focusing on candidate regions. The associations of Yamnaya and WHG ancestries to respectively higher and lower cholesterol levels, together with the observed signatures of selection at loci connected to cholesterol and BMI, add a new component to our understanding of post-neolithic dietary adaptation7,30,31 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2822%2900108-7
>>18240194It's gotta be the EEF DNA. It encodes for good cardiovascular health. >>18242751Sardinians are incredibly long-lived and have lower Steppe and higher of both EEF and WHG. I'm inclined to agree. It's not the presence of WHG, it's the lack of Steppe.
