For a long time, Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo nurtured a dream that seemed impossible: to extract DNA from Egyptian mummies and thereby “get to know” people who lived thousands of years ago more closely. Adolescent obsession led him down a thorny path—through painful scientific searching, a fight for the purity of experiments and intellectual honesty, diplomatic maneuvers and bureaucratic wars… And it took him much further into the depth of centuries, to the reading of the Neanderthal genome that radically changes our understanding of both Neanderthals themselves and their interaction with the ancestors of modern humans.
“Neanderthal” is not only an exciting account of a sensational breakthrough, but also a document that records an important milestone in the history of science: the emergence of paleogenetics, a new discipline that makes it possible—through the study of ancient DNA—to reconstruct the picture of evolution of our species in such detail that we previously dared not even dream of.