This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.
“Svante’s work is the definition of pioneering,” says Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It has pushed boundary after boundary over the last couple of decades, achieving what was previously considered impossible: not only recovering ancient DNA from fossil bones, but also sequencing entire genomes of our extinct relatives and even retrieving their DNA from the ancient sediments of the caves in which they lived.
Pääbo was born in Stockholm in 1955, and was interested in early human history from a young age. His Nobel-winning research initially focused on extracting ancient DNA from our closest hominin relatives, Neandertals. But ancient DNA is extremely challenging to study because it degrades into tiny fragments and is easily contaminated by DNA from other sources.
Previously, researchers had speculated about whether modern humans and Neandertals interbred. “When the first Neandertal genome [was] sequenced it was one of those amazing moments in science when suddenly the extent of human knowledge and the scope for further studies had just grown so much larger,” says Sharon Browning, a statistical geneticist at the University of Washington’s Department of Biostatistics.
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