Pääbo’s pioneering attempts in the 1980s, though ultimately unsuccessful, established the ambition and the research agenda of ancient DNA work in Egypt.

His subsequent development of methods for extracting, sequencing, and authenticating ancient DNA from other sources — including Neanderthals, the work that eventually won him the Nobel Prize — built the methodological toolkit that the field would eventually apply successfully to Egyptian material.

The Crick Institute’s Ancient Genomics Laboratory, led by Pontus Skoglund, one of the co-senior authors of the NUE001 study, has been one of the leading centers for ancient DNA research in the world.

It has contributed to landmark studies across multiple continents and time periods, and its combination of laboratory expertise, computational infrastructure, and scientific rigor was essential to the success of the NUE001 project.