The fact that he was dealing with skeletal remains in Europe did help him because unlike in tropical climates in India, the bones and skeletons are much better preserved in colder climates. “In a way, he came up with a very efficient algorithm to get only the Neanderthal DNA. He has really been the leader in this, and his methodologies provided the essential breakthrough for his work on comparison of Neanderthal genomes with the modern man,” said Professor Vasant Shinde, a former vice-chancellor of Pune-based Deccan College (deemed university) who himself has employed similar techniques at the Rakhigarhi excavation site in Haryana and come up with groundbreaking findings about ancient populations in the Indian region.Įxplained | 5 things to know about the prizes
“His main contribution has been in developing the research methodologies to extract DNA samples from very old remains. In some populations of modern human beings, between one and three per cent of the genome has been found to originate from the Neanderthals. In fact, the ancestors of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans co-existed for about 20,000 years, during which they not only interacted with each other, but also inter-bred, Paabo’s research has shown.
In the process, Paabo, who runs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, also discovered the existence of an unknown sub-species of the human family, now called Denisovans, who lived around the same time as the Neanderthals. What Paabo had accomplished was ‘seemingly impossible’, the Nobel Prize committee said in its citation. These methodologies enabled the 67-year-old Svante Paabo, a Swedish scientist based in Germany, to piece together the genome sequence of the Neanderthal, modern human’s cousin species that went extinct about 30,000 years ago, and offer new evidence on the interactions of Neanderthals with ancestors of modern human beings.
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