Ozzy Osbourne Revealed to Have Neanderthal Genes

It's fair to say that Ozzy Osbourne has been granted some behavioral liberties that only a man known as the Prince of Darkness can get. Whether he's biting heads off bats or urinating on grave stones, his actions have always just been attributed to Osbourne being his usual inebriated, boorish self. But as ABC News reports, professional scientists have found a possible cause for his reckless ways, as they confirmed that Osbourne is, in fact, part Neanderthal.

The findings were presented last week at the TED Med conference in San Diego, Calif., by Jorge Conde, founder of Knome Inc. Conde reached out to Osbourne in 2007 to ask if he'd like to take part in his company's "personal genome-sequencing" service. Osbourne shared a bit of skepticism towards the project, confessing in his Sunday Times column that "there's really no plausible medical reason why I should be alive," but he still agreed to the test.

Osbourne's demeanor led him to consume copious amounts of alcohol, cocaine, LSD, morphine and even cough syrup, but the genetic explanation to why his body had such a high tolerance doesn't necessarily connect back to his primal ancestry.

"People thought that [Neanderthals] had no descendents today, but they do," Nathan Pearson said at the conference. "In east Asia and Europe, a lot of us have a little Neanderthal ancestry. We found a sliver of the genes in Ozzy."

Speaking with the Scientific American, Conde confirmed that while a definitive "Ozzy Osbourne gene" doesn't exist, interesting variants were evident in the genetic code that suggest addictive behavior, as well as metabolic anomalies.

"What we did see, as one of our scientists refers to it, is a lot of interesting smoke -- but not any specific fire," Conde told the Scientific American. "We found many variants -- novel variants -- in genes associated with addiction and metabolism that are interesting but not quite definitive."

"I've always said that at the end of the world there will be roaches, Ozzy and Keith Richards," Osbourne's wife Sharon said at the conference. "He's going to outlive us all. That fascinated me -- how his body can endure so much."

Osbourne released 'Scream' this past June, his 10th solo album and recently performed at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.