Nobel Prize in Medicine for findings on human evolution

Biologist Svante Pääbo has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

For committee members, the Swedish biologist established “a completely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics.” By revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, their discoveries provide the foundation for exploring what makes us human.

Pääbo achieved something seemingly impossible: sequencing the Neanderthal genome, an extinct relative of modern humans. Previously, he had also discovered an unknown hominid, which he named Denisovan, from genome data recovered from a small finger bone sample.

Cristian Crespo, anthropologist, university professor and undersecretary of Innovation and Technological Development of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, highlighted, in dialogue with the CTyS-UNLaM Agency, the trajectory and discoveries of Pääbo, who founded and directs the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics of the Institute Max Planck in Germany, one of the most prestigious entities in the world on the subject.

“His work has focused, since the end of the 1980s, on the extraction, classification and analysis of ancient DNA, from skeletal remains from different populations and time periods. The importance of his discoveries has contributed to questioning the dominant paradigm of paleoanthropology up to now”, he highlighted.

In this sense, Crespo considered that the evidence of hybridization discovered by Pääbo and his collaborators would be indicating not only that, possibly, there were no strong biological barriers to reproduction between members of different Homo species, but also that it casts doubt on the definition of species. , at least for Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Svante Pääbo. (Photo: Karsten Möbius)

For Crespo, paleogenomics is “a revolution, not only in the study of human evolution, but also in the analysis of biological diversity from very ancient times.” “Ancient DNA techniques, today, allow us to study species of plants, animals, bacteria and any other organism that has been alive and compare it with current ones. It is a bit like ‘going back to the past’, a line of research that complements and enriches the classic and established lines to study the evolution of different species”, he stressed.

Likewise, he highlighted the contribution of this new discipline to biological anthropology, considering that it allows rethinking the concept of species in evolutionary history and re-evaluating the models of human evolution that were proposed throughout the 20th century.

“Much of the genomic data obtained serves as material to deconstruct highly discussed categories and stop thinking of ‘human’ as something watertight, recognizing and revealing the dynamism of our evolutionary history and its complexity,” he said.

Crespo says that the Neanderthal DNA analyzes yielded several novel results that can hardly be obtained with another line of evidence. “For starters, it was found that well-preserved DNA can be recovered from skeletal remains thousands of years old. And, in addition, the hybridization between Sapiens and Neanderthals could be established; Apparently, it happened between a Sapiens woman and a Neanderthal man”, the researcher deepened.

The investigations of the now Nobel Prize in Medicine also revealed that approximately between 1 and 2 percent of the genome of current populations of European origin could be of Neanderthal origin, and that between 4 and 6 percent of Denisovan DNA is present in the genome of Melanesian populations.

“In short, each new paleogenomic analysis of the new remains always provides new results, which shed light not only on the evolution of Homo sapiens, but also on different representatives of our genus, allowing us to reveal our evolutionary history more clearly. ”, he concluded. (Source: Marianela Ríos (CTyS-UNLaM Agency))