Assuming a constant rate of albumin change and accepting from fossils that the last shared ancestor of cercopithecoids and apes lived about 30 million years ago, the albumin difference between people and chimpanzees implied that they last shared a common ancestor 6 to 4 million years ago ( 4). Wilson and his student Vincent Sarich were famous for showing that human and chimpanzee albumin proteins were about equally different from those of cercopithecoid monkeys, which implied that humans and chimpanzees had accumulated their differences at roughly the same rate.

Pääbo and others revered Wilson for his use of molecules from extant species to illuminate their evolutionary history. Pääbo received his PhD in 1986, and in 1987, he became a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of the distinguished Berkeley biochemist Allan Wilson. Possible contamination remains a major concern in ancient DNA research, and when Pääbo’s team searched for authentic Neanderthal DNA, they took great pains to limit the chances. Like Pääbo’s initial effort, other early searches for ancient DNA did not consider the possibility even the likelihood that contamination from handling, packaging, or the lab environment would overwhelm any genuine ancient DNA and produce a seemingly positive but misleading result. At first, he thought that he was successful ( 2), but he later realized that what he observed could have been recent contaminant, not authentic ancient, DNA ( 3). In a frank and engaging autobiographical memoir ( 1), he describes his graduate-student attempts to detect DNA in Egyptian mummies. As a graduate student in medicine and molecular biology at the University of Uppsala, he was intrigued by the idea that ancient tissues might preserve DNA.

Pääbo was born in 1955 and educated through the PhD in Sweden. Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering the extraction and analysis of DNA from ancient bones, above all those of the Neanderthals.

Svante pääbo neanderthal man