Human History · The Discovery Series

Reading the genomes
of the dead.

DNA was thought to crumble into uselessness soon after death. Painstakingly, we learned to read it anyway — and the genomes of people gone for tens of thousands of years revealed that our own species is not as alone, or as pure, as we believed.

Field  Human HistoryEra  2010 CESubject  Neanderthals & Denisovans
Read at your altitude
The Glance — the essence in twenty seconds

After death, DNA shatters into tiny fragments and is swamped by microbes and the DNA of everyone who has since handled the bone — so for decades, reading the genome of an ancient human looked impossible. Svante Pääbo and his colleagues spent years inventing the clean-room methods and controls to do it reliably. In 2010 they published the genome of a Neanderthal, and found something startling: people outside Africa carry about 1–2% Neanderthal DNA. Our ancestors interbred with them. The same year, a single finger bone yielded the genome of an entirely unknown human group — the Denisovans — identified from DNA alone.

COMMON ANCESTORNEANDERTHALEurope & W. AsiaDENISOVANfound from DNA aloneUSHomo sapiens
Three human lineages from one ancestor — and the dashed lines are real: our species interbred with both. Most people outside Africa still carry Neanderthal DNA; many in Asia and Oceania carry Denisovan DNA too.
Why it matters

It turned human prehistory from a story told by a handful of bones into one we can read in the genome — and showed that Homo sapiens shared the planet, and children, with other kinds of human. Pääbo received the 2022 Nobel Prize.

Same discovery · depth 1 of 3

This is the identical fact set, re-told at a different altitude. Switch any time — the reader keeps your place in the idea, not the prose.

Sources & further reading

3 primary sources · checked against the original papers
  1. R. E. Green et al.A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal GenomeScience, 2010
  2. D. Reich et al.Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in SiberiaNature, 2010
  3. S. PääboThe Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicineawarded 2022

Celestium retells peer-reviewed science for a general audience. Where a claim rests on a specific result, the primary work is cited above — read it at the source.

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