Morning person, you might have Neanderthal genes to thank.

The two groups lived for hundreds of thousands of years before vanishing from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago. Some of their genes may have passed on a survival advantage according to research carried out by a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. Neanderthals and Denisovans might have had immune genes that protected them from new pathogens. Some of the genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans that became more common over generations were related to sleep. They looked at how the extinct hominins might have influenced their daily rhythms. The cells of every animal have hundreds of different kinds of proteins that respond and fall in and out in a 24 hour cycle. They compared the versions of the genes in the extinct hominins to the ones in modern humans.