Svante Pääbo of Sweden awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discoveries on human evolution

What you should know about the Nobel Prizes (2021) 1:04

(CNN) --

Sweden's Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize in medicine for "his discoveries on extinct hominin genomes and human evolution," it was announced Monday.

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The Nobel Committee said Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist, "achieved something seemingly impossible" when he sequenced the first Neanderthal genome and found that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals.

Evidence for his discovery first emerged in 2010, after Pääbo pioneered methods to extract, sequence and analyze ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones.

Thanks to his work, scientists can compare Neanderthal genomes with the genetic records of humans alive today.

Nobel Prize in Medicine