Published 3 October 2022 at 12.33
Domestic. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 is awarded to the Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genetic mass of extinct hominins and human evolution”.
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Svante Pääbo has succeeded in mapping the genome of Neanderthals, an extinct relative of now living humans.
He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova.
Pääbo also made the important discovery that interbreeding between Homo sapiens and our extinct relatives took place after the migration out of Africa about 70,000 years ago.
The gene flow from extinct human forms that left traces in now living people outside Africa has been shown to have physiological significance, among other things for people's defense against infections.
“Pääbo's pioneering discoveries have created a completely new field of research, paleogenomics. His mapping of the genome of extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans has given us completely new conditions to understand the genetic basis of what makes us all uniquely human”, writes the Nobel Assembly in a press release.