A Nobel-Worthy Look at Ancient Genomes

The field of paleoanthropology asks the questions many of us have wondered about at one point or another. Where did humans come from? What happened to other similar species like the Neanderthals? Do we share any of our genomes with Neanderthals or other hominins — species closely related to modern day humans? Turns out, beginning to answer these questions can cop you a Nobel Prize.

In 2022, Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine — a first for a paleoanthropologist — “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” Pääbo and his group have managed to sequence the genome of multiple Neanderthals and discovered some fascinating things about how our Neanderthal ancestry continues to shape our lives today.