PEOPLE IN SCIENCE

Evolutionary Anthropology, the work of Svante Pääbo

On October 03, 2022, Professor Thomas Perlmann announced that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.

Who is Svante Pääbo?

Svante Pääbo was born on April 20, 1955, in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the son of a relationship between chemist Karin Pääbo and biochemist Sune Karl Bergström, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He did his postdoctoral studies under the tutelage of Allan Wilson, who in turn was a pioneer in the field of evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

By 1990 he became a professor at the University of Munich in Germany, and in 1999 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Courtesy: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

What makes your research so interesting?

Pääbo was a pioneer in developing methodologies for the study of DNA in Neanderthals, a path that would take him several decades of his life; however, his efforts have been reflected in several important publications and discoveries, laying the foundations for a completely new scientific discipline, now called Paleogenomics.

Thanks to the standardization of methods, Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, through a 40,000-year-old bone. His study surprised many because when compared with the DNA of contemporary humans and chimpanzees, it was shown that this sequence was unique, giving rise to the discovery of a new ancestor, the Denisova. By 2010, Pääbo and his team published a paper showing the first comparative analysis of the genome of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal, changing the course of history by demonstrating that the common ancestor between them existed 800,000 years ago.

Comparative analyzes have also shown that Neanderthal DNA is more similar to the DNA of contemporary humans of European or Asian origin relative to people of African origin.

This means that Denisova Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted and interbred. Thanks to these discoveries we understand that gene sequences from our archaic ancestors influence the physiology of present-day humans, providing a new avenue for understanding human evolution and migration.

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Clinical Trial Assistant at Drox Health Science

References

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize in Disclosure AB (2023). May 6, 2023. Retrieved from: <https:// www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/summary/>

Krings, M., Stone, A., Schmitz, R. W., Krainitzki, H., Stoneking, M., & Pääbo, S. (1997). Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans. Cell, 90(1), 19-30. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0092-8674(00)80310-4

Pääbo, S. P., Kelson, J. K., & Reich, D. R. (2012). A high-coverage genome sequence from an archaic Denisovan individual. Science, 338(6104). Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1126/ciencia.1224344