We know that the Neanderthal people didn’t die out entirely before inter-breeding with the humans who went on to populate the Earth.

There are traces of Neanderthal DNA in a good portion of people alive today – but what if you could point them out by the size of their noses?

According to this recent study, Neanderthals may have evolved their larger noses to help them cope with the colder climate.

Study author Dr. Kaustubh Adhikari explains how we’re figuring this out now.

“In the last 15 years, since the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we have been able to learn that our own ancestors apparently interbred with Neanderthals, leaving us with little bits of their DNA. Here, we find that some DNA inherited from Neanderthals influences the shape of our faces. This could have been helpful to our ancestors, as it has been passed down for thousands of generations.”

Comparing Neanderthal and human skulls makes it obvious that the former had taller noses, with the distance between their nasion (where the top of the nose meets the brown) and the philtrum.

Researchers examined the DNA of over 6,000 subjects in Latin America to get a better idea of how genes influence that spacing.

They cross-referenced this information with images of their faces, and identified 33 genome regions associated with face shape.

26 of these regions were replicated in participants from Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Region 1q32.3 showed introgression from Neanderthals and was associated with increased nasal height.

The Activating Transcription Factor 3 (ATF3) gene was found to have evolved due to natural selection, meaning it must have aided the survival chances of the Neanderthals that carried it.

The bigger their noses, the higher chance they had of passing on their DNA, says study author Dr. Qing Li.

“It has long been speculated that the shape of our noses is determined by natural selection; as our noses can help us to regulate the temperature and humidity of the air we breathe in, different shaped noses may be better suited to different climates that our ancestors lived in. The gene we have identified here may have been inherited from Neanderthals to help humans adapt to colder climates as our ancestors moved out of Africa.”

So, there you go.

The next time you size up your nose in the mirror, you know who too blame.

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