Nobel Prize in medicine awarded for research into the evolutionary history of humankind
A Swedish scientist won the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology on Monday for his groundbreaking research into the evolutionary history of humankind.
Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, accomplished something widely believed to be impossible: recovering and reading DNA from 40,000-year-old bones. By developing new techniques for working with ancient genetic material — which is often heavily degraded and contaminated by microorganisms — he led teams that sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal, and discovered a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Pääbo unlocked scientists’ understanding of how genes from these extinct relatives have been passed down to present-day humans.
