It’s now official: British singer Ozzy Osbourne is the descendant of a Neanderthal man.
Researchers who studied the DNA of the 61-year-old heavy metal singer, who has survived years of drug abuse and alcohol addiction, found that he shares the genome of a prehistoric man.
Neanderthals may have died out 30,000 years ago, but their genes are believed to be living in some modern humans.
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The DNA study also revealed that the singer is also a distant relative of outlaw Jesse James — the last Russian tsar Nicholas II and King George I — and shares some genes with the ancient Romans, the
Osbourne, who famously bit the head off a bat while drunk on stage and broke his neck in a quad bike accident in 2003, joked that news of his Neanderthal heritage would not come “as much of a surprise” to his wife Sharon or to police departments around the world.
Scientists made the discovery by taking a sample of the singer’s blood at his home in Buckinghamshire and sending it to a lab in New Jersey in the U.S.
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Using a state-of-the-art 12,000-pound test, they were able to unlock his genetic code, or genome.
The researchers discovered that the star shares some DNA with the ancient Romans who were killed in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
Reacting over the news, Osbourne said: “That means I’m also probably related to some of the survivors, which makes a lot of sense.
“If any of the Roman Osbournes drank nearly as much as I used to, they wouldn’t have even felt the lava. They could have just walked it off.”
The researchers also examined the gene the body uses to break down alcohol and discovered an “unusual variant” that could have helped Osbourne survive during the years when he drank up to four bottles of Cognac a day.
“Given the swimming pools of booze I’d guzzled over the years — not to mention all the [drugs] — there’s really no plausible medical reason why I should be alive,” the singer was quoted as saying.