On Oct. 3, 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to was awarded to Svante Paabo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” Through his pioneering research, Svante Paabo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans.

He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.