Amman, Oct 3 (Petra) -- The Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday was awarded Monday to Svante Paabo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins.

Paabo, 67, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. It was a "seemingly impossible task," said Anna Wedell, a member of the Nobel committee, according to the Washington Post.

The work was transformative, showing that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after they migrated out of Africa, and the vestiges of those interactions live on in the genomes of many present-day people.

Paabo’s efforts laid the foundation of a new field of science that uses ancient DNA as a new stream of information to probe human evolution.

//Petra// AF

03/10/2022 22:03:31