“Svante Pääbo and his team have done nothing more than invent a time machine”, estimates Monday October 3 on franceinfo Ludovic Orlando, paleogeneticist, director of research at the CNRS, director of the center of anthropobiology and genomics of Toulouse (CAGT).
The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year crowned the pioneer of paleogenomics, the Swede Svante Pääbo for the complete sequencing of the genome of Neanderthal man. He is at the origin of the foundation of this discipline which goes back to the DNA of the bottom of the ages to illuminate the human genes of today. “Even if the Neanderthals disappeared from the surface of the planet around 40,000 years ago, part of their genetic heritage continues to be expressed in us today”, adds Ludovic Orlando.
franceinfo : Svante Pääbo, it is the scientist who made your discipline emerge, who revolutionized it, who is being rewarded. There, we uncork the champagne at your place?
Ludovic Orlando : Downright. He is the one who not only launched the discipline, but also revolutionized it from year to year, and this, for more than thirty years now. Indeed, today is a great celebration.
What he discovers to everyone’s amazement is that we are connected to Neanderthals. That’s it ?
He demonstrates that. Indeed, we already knew that Neanderthals were, so to speak, our cousin species, our closest population, in a way. But what it really shows is that Neanderthals and we exchanged genes, had children and fertile offspring together, and ultimately, even though Neanderthals disappeared from the face of the planet about 40 000 years, part of their genetic heritage continues to express itself in us today, 40,000 years later. And that is what is quite fabulous in these discoveries which show us that the past never completely disappears and finally has something to say about our current societies, including our health today. Let us not forget that the Nobel Prize was not awarded to him for chemistry but for medicine.
We were far from imagining the result of these discoveries when he began. Do you remember the reactions or not?
We were all already amazed. You have to realize that, the challenge. Do you realize, sequencing the full gene pool of individuals who didn’t live the day before yesterday or even the last week, but 40,000 years ago, so that means that Svante Pääbo and his team have done neither more nor less than inventing a time machine. Truly, then, the super action is great when you time travel with genetics. Finally, his discovery is not really surprising in the sense that some of the paleoanthropologists had already made the hypothesis that Neanderthals and we finally had fertile descent. But he demonstrated it. Faced with hypotheses, science needs facts and certainties, observable facts, he is one of those who answered this question.
And the research continues today. What do we have left to discover?
We still have to discover the essential of what we don’t know, in particular about Neanderthal. He sequenced the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, twelve years later there are only a few handfuls of Neanderthal genomes that are known, that have been sequenced. So, obviously, sequencing more and more Neanderthal men and women will allow us to better understand this population in the sense of its genetic intimacy. Thanks to this, we will be able to estimate how many there were, how many of them reproduced and how these populations were differentiated in space. Were the Neanderthals who lived in Western Europe the same as those living in Eastern Europe or the same as those who lived in Central Asia, for example? These are questions that are still unanswered. Svante Pääbo’s work has made it possible to bring genetics to the fore, without ever forgetting that the richness lies in the dialogue with the other sub-disciplines of paleoanthropology.
You have already met Svante Pääbo. You know him ?
So I have that chance. He was one of those who inspired me to make the career I have today in paleogenetics. I had the chance to work with him in the genetic analysis of Neanderthals who themselves lived about a hundred thousand years ago. They were Neanderthals whose remains were found in the caves of Belgium and we were there around 2007-2008, when we made this publication.