![]() She sort of was very much into science, and very much stimulated and encouraged me through the years.” "And in some sense it makes me a bit sad that she can’t experience this day. “The biggest influence in my life was for sure my mother, with whom I grew up," he said in the Nobel interview. He father took a “big interest” in his work, he said, but it was his mother who most encouraged him. In his book “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes,” Paabo described himself as Bergstrom’s “secret extramarital son” - something he also mentioned briefly on Monday. Paabo’s father, Sune Bergstrom, won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982, the eighth time the son or daughter of a laureate also won a Nobel Prize. Paabo took it with humor, splashing his feet and laughing. During the celebrations after the news conference in Leipzig, colleagues threw him into a pool of water. Paabo, 67, performed his prizewinning studies at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute. “Would we see even worse racism against Neanderthals, because they were really in some sense different from us? Or would we actually see our place in the living world quite in a different way when we would have other forms of humans there that are very like us but still different,” he said. He also mused about what would have happened if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years. “I thought, ‘Oh the lawn mower’s broken down or something'" at the summer home. “So I was just gulping down the last cup of tea to go and pick up my daughter at her nanny where she has had an overnight stay, and then I got this call from Sweden," he said in an interview on the Nobel Prizes homepage. ![]() Paabo said he was surprised to learn of his win, and at first thought it was an elaborate prank by colleagues or a call about his summer home in Sweden. For example, Tibetans share a gene with Denisovans that helps them adapt to high altitude. “By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, Homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments,” Wedell said. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6% of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating interbreeding occurred there too. Wedell called it “a sensational discovery” that showed Neanderthals and Denisovans were sister groups that split from each other around 600,000 years ago. Paabo and his team managed to extract DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, leading to the recognition of a new species of ancient humans they called Denisovans. Neanderthals were never in Africa, so there's no known direct contribution to people in sub-Saharan Africa. People outside Africa have 1-2% of Neanderthal genes. This transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. ![]() “Paabo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence," said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee. This included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species, around 800,000 years ago.
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