Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” the Nobel Assembly announced today (October 3). The Swedish-born Pääbo, who is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Germany, is known for his work on sequencing DNA from ancient humans and our extinct cousins. The Nobel announcement credits Pääbo’s work with establishing a new scientific discipline, paleogenomics.
“His work has revolutionised our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern man,” says Martin Stratmann, president of the Max Planck Society, in a press release. “Svante Pääbo, for example, demonstrated that Neanderthals and other extinct hominids made a significant contribution to the ancestry of modern man.”
DNA degrades relatively quickly, and so researchers often struggle to purify and analyze fragments of the molecule from remains that are thousands of years old. In 1985, Pääbo ...
