The human branch divides into lineages of Africans, Asians, and Europeans, and then into twigs for smaller groups like the people of New Guinea or the residents of the remote Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. He starts with a pair of lines - one for humans and one for Neanderthals - that split off from a common ancestor no more than 700,000 years ago. And today, in his office overlooking Avenue Louis Pasteur in Boston, he picks up a blue marker, walks up to a blank white wall, and shows the result to me. The race for the Neanderthal genome is reminiscent of the human genome story of 10 years previously, as recounted in James Shreeve's The Genome War.David Reich, a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, has redrawn our species’ family tree. Along the way, a key collaborator became a competitor and, midstream, Pääbo abandoned one collaborating gene-sequencing company for another. 'His book is also valuable for showing just how modern research teams work together and, sometimes, fall out. Peter Forbes of The Guardian, remarking on the book's characterization of the research process, stated that: The book was well reviewed by The New York Times, with Carl Zimmer calling it 'a fascinating account.' The book made the paper's Sunday Book Review Editors' Choice List. The events of this discovery are covered in the last chapter of the book. Around this time, Pääbo and his team at Max Planck also sequenced the genome of an unknown hominin, now known as the Denisovans.

This work brought Pääbo international fame and recognition with the publication of an initial draft of the genome in the journal Science in 2010, followed by a more complete analysis in 2013. Much of the book is devoted to his research team's efforts at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology towards mapping the Neanderthal genome as part of the Neanderthal genome project. He describes the emergence and development of the field of evolutionary genetics, and contributions to it made by himself and colleagues. He touches upon his personal life, reflecting on his father, the chemist Sune Bergström, with whom he had a relatively distant relationship, and on his own marriage and son. Pääbo describes his early interest in Egyptology, and how his work in sequencing the DNA of a mummy led him into evolutionary anthropology.

Pääbo neanderthal man