His research also found that it was mainly female Neanderthals who would leave their birth group to migrate to other tribes and reproduce. Pääbo’s main discovery, which is arguably the most important, is that “purity” is a myth - we have long been mixing and migrating with other hominins. As New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert put it: Trying to extract DNA samples from ancient specimens is like “trying to reassemble a Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday's trash, and left to rot in a landfill.” In modern-day humans of European or Asian descent, approximately 1-4% of the genome originates from the Neanderthals. During the period that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens co-existed, they interbred all the time. On the contrary, Pääbo and his team discovered the extent of the relationships we had with our extinct relatives. Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia 30,000 years ago before they disappeared, but because they had such distinctive features, it was widely believed that they did not reproduce with modern humans. About 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens migrated from Africa into the Middle East and to the rest of the world beyond. He wanted to answer the simple (and wildly complicated) every person has asked themselves at some point in their lives: What makes me me ? Where do we come from and how are we related to those who came before us? What makes us uniquely human?įor context, we know that modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa 300,000 years ago. He has essentially cracked the code of human existence by doing the seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of the present-day human. Well, Pääbo has spent his entire career digging into our past to help us to better understand our future.

Pääbo’s discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution earned him the 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. This was Svante Pääbo’s reaction upon learning that he was the winner of the Nobel Prize.

“I first thought it was an elaborate prank.”

Svante paabo book