Ancient DNA & Human Origins
Sequencing DNA from bones, teeth and sediments revealed Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in living people; Svante Pääbo won the 2022 Nobel Prize.
Open in the interactive tree →Cheaper sequencing methods from 2009 made whole ancient genomes possible; in 2010 Svante Pääbo's group published a draft Neanderthal genome, identified the Denisovans from a finger bone, and found that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of non-African people roughly 50,000-60,000 years ago. Pääbo received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 'for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution'. The age limit kept receding: DNA from mammoth teeth over a million years old was reported in 2021 and two-million-year-old DNA from Greenland sediments in December 2022. In June 2025 two studies in Science and Cell used proteins and mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus to identify the 146,000-year-old Harbin skull as Denisovan, giving the group a skull to compare with other fossils.
Prerequisites
- Radiocarbon Dating1949Ancient genomes are dated with radiocarbon
- PCR1985
- Genome sequencing2003
Unlocks
- Predicting traits from DNAopenAncient genomes show which variants were selected over time, clues to what they do