Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist and Nobel Laureate who specialises in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. In 1997, he became founding director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Since 1999, he has been an honorary professor at Leipzig University; he currently teaches molecular evolutionary biology at the university. He is also an adjunct professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
Archaeogenetics is the study of ancient DNA using various molecular genetic methods and DNA resources. This form of genetic analysis can be applied to human, animal, and plant specimens. Ancient DNA can be extracted from various fossilized specimens including bones, eggshells, and artificially preserved tissues in human and animal specimens. In plants, ancient DNA can be extracted from seeds and tissue. Archaeogenetics provides us with genetic evidence of ancient population group migrations, domestication events, and plant and animal evolution. The ancient DNA cross referenced with the DNA of relative modern genetic populations allows researchers to run comparison studies that provide a more complete analysis when ancient DNA is compromised.
Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Hypotheses on the causes of the extinction include violence, transmission of diseases from modern humans which Neanderthals had no immunity to, competitive replacement, extinction by interbreeding with early modern human populations, natural catastrophes, climate change and inbreeding depression. It is likely that multiple factors caused the demise of an already low population.
The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
The Altamura Man is a fossil of the genus Homo discovered in 1993 in a karst sinkhole in the Lamalunga Cave near the city of Altamura, Italy. Remarkably well preserved but covered in a thick layer of calcite taking the shape of cave popcorn the find was left in situ in order to avoid damage. Research during the following twenty years was based mainly on the documented on-site observations. Consequently, experts remained reluctant to agree on a conclusive age nor was there consensus on the species it belonged to.
The Neanderthal genome project is an effort of a group of scientists to sequence the Neanderthal genome, founded in July 2006.
The Barcelona Biomedical Research Park ("PRBB") is an agglomeration of six public research centres and is located alongside the Hospital del Mar de Barcelona. The PRBB is the product of an initiative launched by the Government of Catalonia, the City Council of Barcelona and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which aims to promote research and collaboration between closely related fields. Each centre works independently in its own field and a management group, the PRBB Consortium, is responsible for managing the building and facilities, in addition to coordinating joint scientific research activities among the various centres. About 1,400 people are employed in the PRBB, making it one of the largest biomedical research clusters in the south of Europe. The centre was opened in May 2006.
The Sidrón Cave is a non-carboniferous limestone karst cave system located in the Piloña municipality of Asturias, northwestern Spain, where Paleolithic rock art and the fossils of more than a dozen Neanderthals were found. Declared a "Partial Natural Reserve" in 1995, the site also serves as a retreat for five species of bats and is the place of discovery of two species of Coleoptera (beetles).
The multiregional hypothesis, multiregional evolution (MRE), or polycentric hypothesis, is a scientific model that provides an alternative explanation to the more widely accepted "Out of Africa" model of monogenesis for the pattern of human evolution.
Neanderthals, also known colloquially as cavemen, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. The type specimen, Neanderthal 1, was found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in present-day Germany.
Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans occurred during the Middle Paleolithic and early Upper Paleolithic. The interbreeding happened in several independent events that included Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as several unidentified hominins.
Johannes Krause is a German biochemist with a research focus on historical infectious diseases and human evolution. Since 2010, he has been professor of archaeology and paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen. In 2014, Krause was named a founding co-director of the new Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.
Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present.
Núria López Bigas is a Spanish biologist and research professor with expertise in medical genetics, computational biology, and bioinformatics. She is an ICREA professor at Pompeu Fabra University and she also leads the Biomedical Genomics Research Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain. Her research is focused on developing computational approaches to investigate cancer genomes.
Genetic studies on Neanderthal ancient DNA became possible in the late 1990s. The Neanderthal genome project, established in 2006, presented the first fully sequenced Neanderthal genome in 2013.
Viviane Slon is a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She identified that a teenage girl born 90,000 years ago had both Neanderthal and Denisovan parents. She was selected as one of Nature's 10 in 2018.
The Institute of Evolutionary Biology (In Spanish Instituto de Biología Evolutiva IBE is a joint research center of Pompeu Fabra University and the Spanish National Research Council founded in 2008. IBE is the only research center in Catalonia and the rest of Spain that is entirely dedicated to evolutionary biology and natural resources.
Liran Carmel is an Israeli scientist, professor of computational biology at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Carmel is the Snyder Granadar Chair for Genetics, and is the 2021 Massry Prize laureate for his studies in the field of ancient DNA.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo "for his research in the field of genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution". It was announced by Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on 3 October 2022.
Hugo Zeberg is a Swedish physician and academic. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet.
