Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

In the summer of 1981, a little-known Swedish graduate student named Svante Pääbo brought a calf's liver to the lab. Pääbo was supposed to be studying viruses, but his true passion was Egyptian mummies. At the time, no one believed that genetic material could be extracted from thousand-year-old organic remains, so Pääbo decided to experiment. He put the liver into an oven and kept it there at a temperature of 120°C for several days, thus recreating the process of mummification. Eventually, in the blackened, rock-hard piece of flesh, Pääbo found fragments of DNA. This marked the beginning of three decades of scientific research, culminating in the sequencing of the full Neanderthal genome in 2010.
In his book, Pääbo offers an insightful and candid account of how his quirky hobby turned into a brilliant scientific career. His discoveries force us to take a new look at the history of modern humans, their connection to Neanderthals, and the reasons why Homo Sapiens survived while Neanderthals vanished into oblivion. In 2022, for his outstanding achievements in studying the genomes of extinct hominins, Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The book «Neanderthal Man» is being published in Ukrainian for the first time.