Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his discoveries surrounding the genomes of Neanderthals and Denisova people, the Nobel Prize Committee announced in the press release.

Early in his career, Svante Pääbo began investigating how to use modern genetic methods to study Neanderthal DNA. He first managed to sequence a piece of mitochondrial Neanderthal DNA, but soon shifted his focus to the complete nuclear genome. In 2010, he managed to completely sequence the first Neanderthal genome, allowing the comparison of the genomes of homo sapiens and Neanderthals. He and his team did the same with Denisova man.