The Svante Pääbo Connection

No account of Denny’s discovery would be complete without acknowledging the scientific lineage that made it possible — specifically, the decades of work by Svante Pääbo and his colleagues that built the methodological foundation on which the Denisova 11 analysis rested.

Pääbo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 specifically for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution, was not simply a technical innovator.

He was the driving intellectual force behind the project of reading the genomes of ancient humans, and his laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology was the primary crucible in which the methods and insights that produced the Denisova 11 finding were developed.