Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

Author: Svante Paabo

Like most people, I was vaguely aware that Neanderthals were somewhere along the path of our evolution from ape to human, but knew very little about them. Then one day, I happened to stumble upon Svante’s TED Talk about “DNA clues to our inner Neanderthal” and was riveted by the idea that we all had a little bit of the Neanderthal genome in us.

This book is a first person account of Svante and his team’s journey in sequencing the Neanderthal genome and comparing it to humans across the globe today. He goes back to how he got his start in the genome sequencing business, and does an excellent job of describing all the technical challenges that he had to surmount. It is hard enough to sequence the genome for living beings where you have an abundance of DNA to work with. Svante and his team had to deal with a very limited supply of Neanderthal remains that could have been significantly contaminated by the DNA of other living things that they shared the soil with for the last 40,000 years. 

By force of necessity, he invents various mechanisms to distinguish between the original DNA and possible contaminants and manages to find a way to sequence a majority of the Neanderthal genome. The book is very well written and I was drawn in by Svante’s enthusiasm for the subject. On completion of the book, I am obsessed with finding out more about how the modern homo sapiens came to be.