A geneticist read the DNA of a species that vanished 40,000 years ago

Svante Pääbo spent decades developing methods to extract usable DNA from fragmented, contaminated ancient bones, and in 2010 his team published the first sequenced Neanderthal genome. The work revealed that most living humans carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA, and won him the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

— Svante Pääbo et al., A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome — Science, vol. 328, 2010