Nobel Prize Medicine to the archaeologist of human evolution

(ANSA) - ROME, OCTOBER 03 - The Nobel Prize for Medicine 2022 was awarded exclusively to the Swede Svante Paabo, 67, for having opened a new field of research, lapaleogenomics.

Born on April 20, 1955 in Stockholm, Paabo can be considered a kind of DNA archaeologist.

Pääbo is credited with having tackled one of the greatest scientific challenges at the same time with new weapons.

In fact, he was the first to bring genetics into a field such as lapaleontology, which until then had been based on the study of fossils or very ancient artifacts.

Thanks to new genetic technologies, Pääbo was among the pioneers of the extraction of the fossil Dnadai and its analysis.

The research he coordinated threw a new light on human evolution, to the point of completely revolutionizing its study.

For example, Pääbo is responsible for the analysis of Neanderthal DNA, which revealed that Homo sapiens crossed with Neanderthals and that some of those human cousins ​​are still present in the genome of almost all contemporary populations.

The discovery of an ancient human population, the Denisovans, also crossed with Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago, is also due to Pääbo's research: the starting point to reconstruct its history was a fragment of a bone found in a cave in the mountains. Altai.

   (HANDLE).