Many of the illnesses we suffer today are down to our ancestors not having enough choice in the mating game, UK researchers believe.
Inbreeding over the millennia has left us with "sloppy" control over our genes, making us vulnerable to disease.
This is basically a larger-scale of the "founder effect". Genetic defects that were prevelant in a small founding population have been inherited by all its descendents.
The researchers believe that most of the damaging mutations occurred when there was only a small population of early hominids - the two-legged primates who later evolved into humans and chimpanzees.
At the time, there may have been as few as 10,000 hominids to breed with one another.
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