Svante Paabo is awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine this year for his discoveries on Human Evolution. On Monday, Thomas Perlmann, Secretary of the Nobel Committee, announced the winner at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

The medicine prize kicked off the week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, followed by chemistry and literature on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will come out on Friday, and the economics award on October 10.

Through his ground-breaking research, Svante Pääbo has accomplished the most prestigious prize: after sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the astonishing discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova, that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Importantly, Pääbo also discovered that following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago, gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens. Today this ancient flow of genes has a physiological relevance to present-day humans.

In 1990, Pääbo joined Munich University, where he continued his research on archaic DNA as a newly appointed professor. He analyzed DNA from Neanderthal mitochondria – organelles in cells with their DNA. The mitochondrial genome is microscopic and contains only a fraction of the genetic information in the cell. However, it is in an abundance of copies, increasing the chance of success.