Neanderthal Man

In the summer of 1981, an unknown Swedish graduate student named Svante Pääbo brought a calf’s liver into the lab. Pääbo was supposed to be studying viruses, but his real passion was Egyptian mummies. At the time, no one believed that genetic material could be extracted from organic remains thousands of years old, so Pääbo decided to experiment. He stuck the liver in an oven and kept it there at a temperature of 120 °C for several days, thus recreating the process of mummification. Eventually, Pääbo found fragments of DNA in the blackened, stone-dried piece of flesh. This marked the beginning of three decades of scientific research, culminating in the sequencing of the complete Neanderthal genome in 2010.

In his book, Pääbo offers an insightful and candid account of how his eccentric hobby turned into a brilliant scientific career. His discoveries force us to take a new look at the history of modern humans, their connection with Neanderthals, and the reasons why Homo Sapiens survived and Neanderthals disappeared. In 2022, Svante Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his outstanding achievements in studying the genomes of extinct hominins.

“Neanderthal” is being published in Ukrainian for the first time.