Neanderthal Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

or less independently, from Homo erectus. They saw a deep history dividing current groups of humans: the ancestors of current Europeans, for instance, were thought to be the Neanderthals and perhaps earlier European hominins; the ancestors of current Asians were thought to be other archaic forms in Asia, going back to Peking Man. However, a growing number of respected paleontologists, foremost among them Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London, now viewed the out-of-Africa model of modern human origins as the best fit to both the fossil record and the archaeological evidence. Chris had been invited by Cell to the press conference, where he announced that our retrieval of Neanderthal DNA was to paleontology what the lunar landing had been to space exploration. I was of course pleased, though not surprised, by his praise. I was even more pleased when the “other side,” the multiregionalists, had good things to say at least about the technical  aspects of our work—particularly when the most vociferous and pugnacious of them, Milford Wolpoff, of the University of Michigan, declared in a commentary in Science that “if anyone would be able to do this, it would be Svante.”
    All in all, I was stunned by the attention our paper received. It was reported on the first page of many major newspapers and on radio and TV news shows worldwide. In the week after the paper appeared, I spent most of my time on the phone with journalists. I had worked on ancient DNA since 1984 and had gradually realized that it must in principle be possible to recover Neanderthal DNA. And nine months had now passed since Matthias called and awakened me to say he saw a DNA sequence that did not look human come out of one of our sequencing machines. So I’d had time to get used to the idea and, unlike most of the rest of the world, was not shaken by our achievement. Once the media frenzy had died down, though, I felt the need for some perspective. I wanted to reflect on the years that had led up to this discovery and to think about where I would go next.
     
     

  Chapter 2  Mummies and Molecules
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    It did not begin with Neanderthals, but with ancient Egyptian mummies. Ever since my mother took me to Egypt when I was thirteen, I had been fascinated with its ancient history. But when I started to pursue this study in earnest, at the University of Uppsala in my native Sweden, it became increasingly clear that my fascination with Pharaohs, pyramids, and mummies was the romantic dream of an adolescent. I did my homework; I memorized the hieroglyphs and the historical facts; I even worked two consecutive summers cataloging pottery shards and other artifacts at the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm, which might well have become my future workplace, were I to become an Egyptologist in Sweden. I found that the same people did very much the same things the second summer as they had the first summer. Moreover, they went to lunch at the same time, to the same restaurant, ordered the same meals, discussed the same Egyptological puzzles and academic gossip. In essence, I came to realize that the discipline of Egyptology was moving too slowly for my tastes. It was not the kind of professional life I imagined for myself. I wanted more excitement, and more relevance to the world I saw around me.
    This disenchantment threw me into a crisis of sorts. In response, and inspired by my father, who had been an MD and later became a biochemist, I decided to study medicine, with a view to doing basic research. I entered medical school at the University of Uppsala and after a few years surprised myself by how much I enjoyed seeing patients. It seemed to be one of the few professions in which you not only met all sorts of people but could also play a positive role in their lives. This ability to engage with people was an unexpected talent, and after four years of medical studies I had another mini-crisis: Should I become a