. We studied their evolutionary history, finding that the elements are shared between humans and many different species of placental mammals. These observations suggest that the elements inserted at least ~102 million years ago (Mya) in the most recent common ancestor of placentals. We further estimated the age of the viral ancestor at around 127 to 262 My. Our results provide evidence for some of the oldest viral integrations in the human genome and insights into the ancient interactions of viruses with the ancestors of modern-day mammals.
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Barreat et al. (2022) studied this question.
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