The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Paabo of Sweden for his work on human evolution. The Prize Committee declared that he achieved the seemingly impossible task of deciphering the genetic code of one of our extinct relatives: the Neanderthals. He also accomplished the “sensational” feat of discovering a previously unknown relative: the Denisovans. His work has helped explore our evolutionary history and how humans spread across the planet. The Swedish geneticist’s work gets to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions: where we came from and what allowed us, Homo sapiens, to succeed while our relatives became extinct.
