Svante Pääbo deserves his accolade – palaeogenetics is an expanding field that tells us who we are
The Neanderthals have won a Nobel prize. Well, almost. Even if most people haven’t heard of Svante Pääbo, the Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient genomes and human evolution has landed him with 2022’s award for physiology or medicine, or the exact science behind palaeogenomics and ancient DNA, they certainly have heard of Neanderthals.
Honouring his contribution to building this incredibly vibrant field of palaeogenomics, the award is much deserved: you need vision, persistence and pioneering methods to recover and sequence immensely old, fragile genetic material. But it’s also a recognition of the astonishing revelations about our deep history that have come from palaeogenomics, which holds many untapped secrets about who we are today, including settling the long-debated question of whether Neanderthals and Homo sapiens ever encountered each other and, let’s say, “warmed up” those icy tundra nights (the answer is yes, many times).
Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
