Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
Svante Pääbo is the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is one of the founders of the field of paleogenetics and, with his team, was responsible for sequencing the Neanderthal genome in 2010 (the Neanderthal Genome Project). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution" (according to the Nobel Prize press release). His book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes , 2014, relates the story of the years leading up to this achievement, which is written as a personal memoir focusing on the details of the scientific method that was developed. One of the difficulties the team was confronted with from the start of their work was the limited ancient material for DNA analysis. However, the greatest problem to solve was finding methods for avoiding contamination while extracting ancient DNA f...