This year’s first Nobel laureate sequenced the DNA of Neanderthals

to be announced each year is often referred to as the “Nobel prize for medicine”. But that is not its real name. It is actually the prize for “physiology or medicine”. And this year’s award was firmly on the physiological side of the divide. The winner—and there was only one, rather than the usual two or three—was Svante Paabo, a man who has the rare distinction of having invented an entire scientific discipline, palaeogenomics, more or less by himself. Palaeogenomics is the study of the genomes of ancient, often extinct, . In particular, Dr Paabo concentrated on ancient members of the genus . His early work, going back to 1985, was on Egyptian mummies. Mummification in Egypt began about 4,600 years ago—an eyeblink in palaeontological terms—and the desert climate of that country is particularly conducive to the preservation of . So this was a good place to begin. But gradually, as genetic-sequencing techniques improved, he was able to push backward in time.