The Indiana Jones Of Genes Lost In Primitive Bones

Painstakingly piecing together the genetic sequence of Neanderthals, Swedish scientist Prof Svante Paabo, the 2022 Nobel laureate in medicine, started a new field of study and contributed to the understanding of what makes us uniquely human

Piecing Together An Origin Story

A bunch of evolutionary advantages went behind making us human beings – the Homo sapiens of biology textbooks – the dominant species of life form on Earth. The search for what makes us uniquely human also showed Paabo that the human genome has borrowed from other hominins, which is a category comprising all modern and extinct humans and their immediate ancestors. In the process, Paabo became one of the progenitors himself of an entirely new branch of genetics called paleogenomics.

Diving Headlong Into An Ancient Gene Pool

Paabo was aware early on in his career of the possibility of using modern genetic methods to study the DNA of humans’ evolutionary ancestors, the closest of whom were the Neanderthals. But it was a task easier said than done. Over time, and we’re looking at tens of thousands of years, DNA becomes chemically modified and degrades into short fragments and can only be recovered in trace amounts heavily contaminated with DNA from bacteria and contemporary humans. But Paabo felt he had his task cut out as he set about developing methods to study DNA from Neanderthals, an endeavour that lasted several decades.