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.
Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was honored for his groundbreaking research on sequencing the genome of the Neandertals, an extinct relative of humans, and discovering a new hominin species, Denisovans. He also demonstrated that humans—Homo sapiens—interbred with these species after migrating out of Africa.
His work addresses important questions about humanity’s origins, including where we came from, why some species went extinct and what makes us uniquely human.
“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.”
Harvati-Papatheodorou says this Nobel “underscores the important implication that evolution and ancient processes have on people today.” And overall, she is “happy that the field of human origins research is receiving this amazing distinction and honor.”
Homo sapiens arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago, research suggests. Neandertals (also spelled Neanderthals), meanwhile, arose outside Africa and lived in Europe and western Asia from about 400,000 years ago until they went extinct roughly 30,000 years ago. Groups of Homo sapiens left Africa around 70,000 years ago, and spread throughout the world. They co-existed with Neandertals in Eurasia for tens of thousands of years, but little was known about the relationship between the two groups.
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…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Scientific American Content: Global…