I never thought I would work on Neanderthals. When I started, it was almost a joke—people said extracting DNA from bones that old was impossible. But sometimes the impossible just takes a bit longer.

Analysis

Pääbo has repeatedly described his initial work on ancient DNA in the 1980s–90s as met with widespread doubt, including his own uncertainty. His 2014 book *Neanderthal Man* and interviews (e.g., *The Guardian*, 2022) corroborate that extracting DNA from ~40,000-year-old bones was considered technically infeasible until his team’s breakthroughs in the 1990s–2000s. The Nobel Committee’s 2022 press materials also highlight this narrative as central to his award for 'discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins.'

Background

Before Pääbo’s work, ancient DNA was assumed to degrade beyond recovery within millennia, not tens of thousands of years. His pioneering methods (e.g., targeting mitochondrial DNA, contamination controls) overturned this assumption, enabling the 2010 publication of the first Neanderthal genome draft. The 'impossible' framing aligns with contemporaneous scientific literature (e.g., *Science*, 1997) dismissing such efforts as speculative.

Verdict summary

Svante Pääbo’s statement accurately reflects his early career skepticism about Neanderthal DNA research and the scientific consensus of the time, as documented in interviews and his own writings.

Sources consulted