Though it involved some difficulties (describes in much detail in the book), Päbo managed to extract DNA from the mummy as well.
When he realised that this was no problem obtained tissue from an egyptian mummy (which he had been interested in for some time). First he tried a cow liver that he had stored in the lab for some time. Having worked with DNA sequencing Päbo wondered whether DNA could be extracted from old samples. To my relief Päbo skips over his early childhood and jumps straight to the time when he studied medicine in Uppsala. It is a well balanced tale which contains just the right mixture of personal details (including that he is bisexual and that he had a long affair with a woman married to a colleague), and science. In this book the Swedish professor, Svante Päbo, who is currently running a lab at the Max Planck institute in Leipzig, tells his tale about how he ended up sequencing the Neanderthal genome. Drawing on genetic and fossil clues, Pbo explores what is known about the origin of modern humans and their relationship to the Neanderthals and describes the fierce debate surrounding the nature of the two species’ interactions.Ī riveting story about a visionary researcher and the nature of scientific inquiry, Neanderthal Man offers rich insight into the fundamental question of who we are. From Pbo, we learn how Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009. A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: What does it mean to be human?
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