Svante Pääbo, prix Nobel de médecine pour ses découvertes en paleogénomique, nouvelle discipline scientifique, en particulier ses travaux de séquençage génétique de néandertaliens et l’exploration de ce qui, à travers l’évolution, apparaît comme spécifiquement humain .

“Svante Pääbo established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics. Following the initial discoveries, his group has completed analyses of several additional genome sequences from extinct hominins. Pääbo’s discoveries have established a unique resource, which is utilized extensively by the scientific community to better understand human evolution and migration. New powerful methods for sequence analysis indicate that archaic hominins may also have mixed with Homo sapiens in Africa. However, no genomes from extinct hominins in Africa have yet been sequenced due to accelerated degradation of archaic DNA in tropical climates.Thanks to Svante Pääbo’s discoveries, we now understand that archaic gene sequences from our extinct relatives influence the physiology of present-day humans. One such example is the Denisovan version of the gene EPAS1, which confers an advantage for survival at high altitude and is common among present-day Tibetans. Other examples are Neanderthal genes that affect our immune response to different types of infections“.https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/press-release/