The same undulating and intertwining forces of mutation, genetic drift, and natural selection that have molded the genomes of modern humanity are also at play in the ever-changing collection of viral variants of SARS-CoV-2. Pääbo has frequently made headlines for his work on Neanderthals (also spelled Neandertal) and the more-recently-discovered Denisovans, but his publication list includes much more.īarry is a former botany professor from the University of Georgia, and I’m a former Drosophila geneticist, the plant guy and fly pusher united in our fascination with evolution. So when my dear friend Barry Palevitz emailed me on Monday morning that paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo had won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, I was jubilant. The once separate roads of paleontology and genetics converged and then merged, fleshing out our forebears one gene and then one precious genome at a time. But I never imagined that we’d be able to scrutinize the genes and genomes of ancient humans and their hominid ancestors, enabling reconstructions based on more than bones. I still have the cigar box of fossils from that weekend.īy college, my interest had turned to genetics. Soon after, when we had to write an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wrote invertebrate paleontologist.

I wasn’t disappointed though, and began reading about worms. The startled man kindly explained to me that yes, I’d discovered fossils, but they weren’t evidence of ancient humans. My mother, who let me adopt insects I found in produce and even crayfish when I couldn’t find any tadpoles in the nearby Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, took me and my fossils up to the 8th floor of the dinosaur museum.

Edith and I spent the weekend collecting. I picked one up, and realized that it wasn’t an ordinary rock. But behind the motel, we waded in a stream, where the angle of the sun on the wet rocks revealed striking patterns of stripes. We couldn’t have cared less about baseball. That happened when I was in the fourth grade, and my parents took my sister and me to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. I loved the museum, but yearned to discover things myself. I remember that part of the museum as The Hall of Man it’s now the Hall of Human Origins. While most kids would rush to the towering dinosaur skeletons, I’d stand, transfixed, at a small glass-enclosed display of skulls and try to envision what their owners had looked like – australopithecines, Neanderthals, a few others. One of my favorite places as a child was the American Museum of Natural History.

Siberian mouse ina