on Monday for his discoveries on human evolution that provided key insights into our immune system and what makes us unique compared with our extinct cousins, the award's panel said.
"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," she said. "Svante Pääbo has discovered the genetic make up of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and the Denison hominins," Nils-Göran Larsson, a Nobel Assembly member, told the Associated Press after the announcement. "And the small differences between these extinct human forms and us as humans today will provide important insight into our body functions and how our brain has developed and so forth.