Svante Pääbo, father of paleogenetics: ‘The reason for the Neanderthals’ extinction lies in how numerous we’ve become’

Svante Pääbo, father of paleogenetics: ‘The reason for the Neanderthals’ extinction lies in how numerous we’ve become’

Geneticist Svante Pääbo demonstrated that DNA can be extracted from human fossils that are thousands of years old. His team was the first to sequence the complete genome of Neanderthals, our closest human relatives, and discovered that Homo Sapiens had sex and children with them. He also revealed the existence of a third, previously unknown human lineage, the Denisovans, thanks to genetic material extracted from a tiny bone of a girl who lived i…