The publication of that genome opened the door to the investigation of questions that paleontologists had since Neanderthal fossils were first found in a German mine in 1856: what were those early humans related to modern people, and what makes them different. ?
Pabo’s enduring passion – how to recover and analyze ancient genetic material – seemed destined to the founder in the face of technical difficulties, Nobel Committee said on Monday. Ancient DNA is prone to chemical damage and is present in very low levels in ancient samples. It can easily soak into the DNA of scientists handling it, making it difficult to separate ancient genes from modern genes. And bacteria can also leave DNA in fossils.
But Pabo used the latest technology for DNA sequencing. When he needed more bone, he navigated the political sensibility of obtaining fragments of fossils from other countries. They designed “clean rooms,” laboratories with high standards for cleanliness that protect samples from contamination. And once he and his team detected millions of pieces of DNA in the fossils, they used sophisticated statistical techniques to rule out modern genetic contaminants.
“Certainly it was thought impossible to recover DNA from 40,000-year-old bones,” said Dr. Nils-Göran Larsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Medicine and professor of medical biochemistry at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The research helped establish that modern humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that lived about 600,000 years ago. Pabo and his team also found genetic evidence that, during the period of coexistence, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together.
Neanderthals lived in much of Europe until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago, for reasons that remain a matter of intense debate. The ancestors of modern humans evolved in Africa before migrating to Europe and Asia, where they mixed with more ancient human forms and picked up on genetic changes that strengthened their chances of survival in new environments. They included gene variants that improved the ability to survive at high altitudes and affected how the immune system responded to infection.
It took some three decades of research for Pabo to describe the Neanderthal genome. They looked for DNA in mummies and older animals, such as extinct cave bears and ground sloths, before turning their attention to ancient humans. “I yearned to bring a new rigor to the study of human history by examining DNA sequence variation in ancient humans,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir ‘Neanderthal Man: In Search of the Lost Genome’.
Pabo drew early inspiration from his Nobel Prize-winning father, listen bergstrom, and in his memoir, recalls that he learned later in his father’s “double life” life, that his existence was kept secret from his father’s other family. Regarding his family, he says that he “always considered himself gay” before meeting the woman who would become his wife. He now identifies as bisexual and has two children with a primatologist. Linda Vigilant,