All Hail Svante Pääbo
Over the last ten years, this magazine has reported from time to time on the advances that were being made by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in the replication and mapping of ancient DNA, a process that even 15 years ago was considered impossible. Thankfully, Professor Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute team studying our Neanderthal cousins as well as the previously unknown Denisova hominin, refused to accept such a defeatist attitude and he has just been awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in this field.
The prize is for Physiology and Medicine, and Pääbo is described as a geneticist, but we have every right to claim him as an archaeologist because his work is not purely biochemical: it has advanced our knowledge of Neanderthal culture as well, not least the discovery that modern humans of Eurasian descent have inherited parts of the Neanderthal genome (and vice versa: there is now evidence from Neanderthal remains from Siberia, Croatia, and Spain of human gene flow into the Neanderthal genome). Such discoveries have led us to reappraise our understanding of Neanderthals and reinterpret the associated archaeological evidence – the tools, the burial rites, the use of ochre – to realise that our two species were much closer than was once thought and that Neanderthals were much more like us in appearance, behaviour, social organisation, and the capacity for abstract thought and creative activity.
Archaeologists have adopted the extraction and analysis of aDNA from humans, from animals, and from plant material and food remains with alacrity. In a very short period of time, we have mapped aspects of human migration that were previously in question – how much do the innovations of farming, pottery use, and metalworking represent the movement of people and how much the transmission of ideas? The answer is surely both, but with a much bigger role for migration and movement than we might have been prepared to accept in recent decades.
