oh dear god. I don't care about authors dating habits and sex life. "barbara and I took to the cinema in the evenings. I did not think anything of it until one of my students said the thought barbara liked me. I did notice it until our knee's touched one evening..." OMG this type of drivel keeps cropping up. I don't care about authors personal life, I want to hear specifics on his research. Did not finish. ( )

For some reason, I was always a bit dubious about the claims that human shared DNA with Neanderthals, figuring that there was so little Neanderthal DNA that could be sussed out, and that some big conclusions were being drawn.

I was wrong. In this book, Svante Pääbo, who led the successful project in Leipzig, discusses his career working with ancient DNA, from early attempts to sequence DNA from Eqyptian mummies to just a couple years ago. He discusses, in detail, the problems they faced, and the solutions they found to them. By the time you finish this, there's no doubt he's correct.

This is a a great picture of how science is done, when its done right. He's always very conscious of trying to shoot holes in his own ideas and the results his team came up with. If you want to pick holes in what he found, go ahead, but you're not going to do a better job of it than he did.

It's also just fun reading: Paabo is a very good explainer of science and technology, and he's good at sketching the characters of his team members and his competitors. He's honest about his failings and times when he led the team down a wrong path, and he doesn't hesitate to give out credit to others.

In short, this is an excellent book, one of the best books about science as it's practiced that I've read; it's also a very appealing, honest, personal memoir. Very highly recommended. ( )

Fascinating account of the mapping of the Neanderthal genome. ( )

Svante Pääbo's memoir that is mainly about the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. I found the technical details that are present to be most interesting. The author's honesty also gives an interesting look into top tier competitive life science. Imagine being so prominent in your field that you can, on the one hand, run down the journals Nature and Science as being too eager to publish half-baked work, and, on the other hand, call the editors of Nature and Science to pre-announce and promote your upcoming work. Overall, it's well worth reading. I did find the details of the author's sexual proclivities to be especially uninteresting. ( )

If all scientists wrote as well (and/or had editors as good as) Svante Pääbo, popular science written by scientists would easily compete with those written by journalists.

Don't get me wrong, I have loved many science books written by journalists: [b:1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus|39020|1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus|Charles C. Mann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865228s/39020.jpg|38742], [b:1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created|9862761|1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created|Charles C. Mann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327900945s/9862761.jpg|14754158], and [b:Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors|110995|Before the Dawn Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors|Nicholas Wade|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348824723s/110995.jpg|2922823] just to name a few recent ones I've read. They are excellent books, well-written and researched.

When a professional in the field tells the story, be they a scientist, historian or whatever, you tend to get a different perspective: more on the inside, a bit better informed and in-depth.

Svante Pääbo does this wonderfully in Neanderthal Man. It is not only the story of the first sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, but the story of the person who lead the effort, written by that same person.

The science in it is top notch as befits a researcher at the top of the field, but what makes it hard to put down is the story. Pääbo shares the personal side of his journey to paleogenetics which is also the story of the birth and childhood of the field as well. From his youthful dreams of decoding ancient DNA to the first sequences and publishing, we see the ups and downs, the successes, frustrations, despairs, fears and ebulliences of all aspects of the scientific life: technical, cultural, competitive and social.

Science is amazing in what it has and can do for us, but we forget that it is a human endeavor and few scientists share this side of it with us (and, of course, the journalists rarely get a chance to see it). Svante Pääbo deserves high praise for wedding the stories of his amazing technical achievement with his intimate personal experience.
( )

Explains our complexity, mixing with other human species. ( )

Overall, this book did not completely live up to my expectations. While it was a fairly interesting premise, the author veered off track too often for me.

Author's Premise: Are we related to Neanderthal Man? If so, how?

Book's Structure: First 3rd is autobiographical. Second 3rd is heavily technical discussion of mitochondrial & ribosomal DNA- its extraction, viability and study. Final 3rd: interesting discussion of how we share certain genes with Neanderthals and how this possibly could have come to pass.

The good: If you are interested in the inner politics and workings of scientific discovery this books goes into great detail about this. The author proves pretty conclusively that we share DNA with ancient humans and has some plausible reasons why. The last third was the most interesting to me.

The bad: Author got side tracked by his own personal biography too often. The premise of the book did not drive the whole narrative. ( )

What I most appreciate about this scientific memoir is Paabo's frank analysis of his personal motivations and how they have driven his career from being a graduate student seeking to study a topic that really didn't exist yet to becoming a scientific entrepreneur with a sharp interest in playing the game to best personal and institutional advantage. ( )

Well written and narrated. ( )

Well written and narrated. ( )

Well worth the investment of time. The author was able to hold my attention with his storytelling ability even though the context of the story is his work with the most complex investigation of the human genome. It is amazing what can be learned through the analysis of DNA extracted from even a very small amount of ancient bone material if very bright and motivated people are committed to openly trying to understand the roots of our humanity. ( )

What a fascinating ride! From working on the genome itself, through the way research institutions work to the personality of Paabo himself.
The book is written very much in the same convention as The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World, which is about the competition between Venter and Collins to sequence the genome. Paabo's book has the same unabashed honesty about rivalry in the science world, but here it's not written by journalist about the scientist, it is written by the scientist himself. Loved it.
I would love all scientists to be like Paabo, actually. He seems really anal in his insistence on purity, repetition of results, checking everything trice, and he seems entirely trustworthy because of that.
Fascinating as well how much we can learn from a tiny fragment of bone of an individual human who had lived eons ago.
5+ ( )

Technical book, chronicling the search for the DNA of a Neanderthal man. Details many delays and obstructions of all sorts - chemical, political, scientific. Waded through the book for the book club discussion, but much of it went over my head. ( )

I have always been interested in animals and anthropology. I was amazed when the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 and astounded when I heard that the human genome was mapped in 2003, so I got this book. The author of this book did a good job explaining how his work progressed. I could not grasp in detail how he did his work, but he explained it well enough that I understood it and felt comfortable with it.

In 1997, the author got a golden opportunity to pursue his lifelong dream of identifying the genome of Neanderthal Man when he was offered a directorship in the Max Plank Institute for genetics in Leipzig, Germany. He did his major work on Neanderthal genome there. He began his search for Neanderthal DNA with mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted from the eggs cells of all mothers to their offspring. But there are in addition two much longer strands of DNA in the nucleus of each cell, one coming from the mother and a matching strand coming from the father. The author knew that if he wants to get the complete genome, he must obtain DNA from the nuclei, so his quest now shifts to nuclear DNA. He used newer and vastly improved lab procedures and testing equipment than he did for his earlier word. The author, Svante Pääbo finally published his paper on the Neanderthal genome at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 2010, bringing the applause of whole scientific community to the fifty-five year old scientist for this extraordinary achievement.

The author and his team have been administering intelligence tests to baby apes and baby humans. Until 10 months of age, there is hardly any difference in the apes and humans. But at around 12 months, humans do something apes do not do: they start to draw the attention of others by pointing. Soon they point at everything just to draw attention. This is the first cognitive trait to appear in children but not in apes. Also humans early on tend to imitate what their elders do, like expressions and mannerisms. Also human parents and other adult humans try to modify and teach correct behavior in the children to a much greater degree than apes do. In contrast, there has been almost no teaching observed in apes. Whereas apes must learn almost every skill through trial and error, without parental activity teaching them, humans can much more effectively build on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations.

Author thinks there is a biological substrate necessary for acquiring human culture, but he is also convinced that social input is necessary for the development of human cognition. Neanderthals appeared between 300,000 to 400,000 years ago and existed until around 30,000 years ago. Throughout the tens of thousands of years of their entire existence, their technology did not change much. Only at the very end of their history, when they may have had contact with true humans, does their technology change in some regions. And they did not migrate over open water to reach other shores.

I picked up on Neanderthal technology not changing for the 270,000 to 370,000 year duration of their existence on earth, whereas human technology has changed drastically in the past 100 years. I see that human technology and culture has changed at an unbelievably exponential rate ever since the beginning of recorded history some 6000 years ago. Even in my lifetime I see a phenomenal increase in human technology. Plus humans are the only physical life forms that cook their food and fashion clothes for themselves. I think something is missing when anthropologists compare humans to other life forms. I think there is a spiritual dimension to being human, something above the sum total of the molecules and genes that are built into the human body, something not composed of matter and not occupying space.

I observe humans being involved in things no animal has ever been involved in, like interest in the purpose of life and appreciation in art, music, exploring the universe. No animal does any of those things. Humans are also very heavily involved in considerations about what is right and what is wrong in human conduct and in discovering the ultimate truth about the world we live in. As far as I know, no animal has ever done any of those things and yet look at how much time and energy humans devote to them.

I’m very interested in learning the science of the world we live in, and I enjoy reading books like this one. I’m sure scientists will eventually arrive at the core of correct science about the world, but today, I think scientists are missing something. I think there is a spiritual dimension to being human; something that should be addressed if we are ever to understand what makes a human different from an animal. ( )

This fascinating book works on many levels. Not only does it tell the story of how Pääbo and his team of colleagues painstakingly developed methods to determine the genomes of Neanderthals and discovered that modern humans (except those of entirely African descent) have some 2-3% of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, but it also is a memoir of Pääbo's intellectual development and paints a wonderful picture of the intensely creative and collaborative (and competitive) nature of modern science.

Pääbo became interested in the past as a teenager, when his mother took him to Egypt and he learned about mummies. Later on, studying them seemed too slow and irrelevant to him; he started out in medicine but then decided to try to isolate DNA from mummies and became interested in biochemistry and molecular biology, particularly the developing field of extracting and studying DNA. After his graduate work, he initially worked with dinosaurs and other extinct animals but, as he notes, when the field of ancient DNA analysis stabilized in the mid-1990s, he wanted to turn again to human remains.

The two biggest challenges in dealing with Neanderthal (and other hominid) DNA are, first, extracting enough DNA from decaying bones filled with bacteria and, second, and perhaps more challenging, finding a way to avoid contamination with modern human DNA. A lot of this book is about how Pääbo and his group painstakingly developed "clean" techniques for dealing with this contamination and for many years had to constantly examine their results and their methods to ensure that the results they were publishing in preeminent international science journals like Science and Nature were supportably free of modern human DNA contamination. Another challenge, involving international collaboration and negotiations, was finding Neanderthal remains from different locations that were sufficiently well preserved to still contain Neanderthal DNA. And imaginative molecular biologists needed to develop ways of tagging the Neanderthal DNA and imaginative computer programmers needed to develop algorithms for analyzing the genomes.

As Pääbo describes the work he and his team did, he also tells the stories of conferences attended, collaborations with other researchers and with companies that make DNA sequencers, publication in scientific journals and how that works, the methods labs and their leaders use to attract other researchers to work with them, the work that goes into creating and maintaining an open and creative atmosphere in a lab, the effort of ensuring that all the imaginable sources of problems with the scientific work have been addressed, the technical revolution in molecular biology, the kinds of illustrative "trees" that show when populations branched off from common ancestors, theories of population migrations, and much more -- including a bit of his personal life as well.

Research continues to identify the DNA of other hominids, including the somewhat mysterious Denisovans, and to determine what the DNA we inherited from Neanderthals codes for (some initial work shows that one sequence is involved in increasing sperm motility, crucial for enhancing the likelihood that a male's genetic material will survive in organisms that don't, like some of the apes, rely on one alpha male impregnating all the group's females).

As Pääbo writes when he learns incontrovertibly that Neanderthals had contributed DNA to modern humans, "it was amazingly cool . . . Neanderthals weren't totally extinct. Their DNA lived on in people today."

In search of lost genomes