While some might have been surprised that the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a paleogeneticist on Monday, researchers say understanding our distant ancestors helps explain modern human health – even when it comes to Covid.

New Nobel laureate Svante Paabo is considered the father of paleogenetics and paleogenomics, which aims to reconstruct the genetic information of long-extinct human relatives.

But the prize may have caused some to wonder why a pioneer in this field received the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

For example, what is the medical use of knowing that modern humans have an average of about two percent Neanderthal DNA, one of Paabo’s major discoveries?

For the second year in a row, the scientists behind mRNA vaccines have been among the odds-makers’ favorites, with millions around the world learning about the technology after getting it stabbed in their arms.

But the Nobel laureates, who tend to reward decades of research, chose Paabo.

“This revolutionary research in genetics and evolution falls within the realm of subjects that could and should be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,” said David Pendlebury, research director at analytics firm Clarivate’s ISI Institute.

“However, it is not an award for a discovery relevant to clinical medicine, which is what many expected this year after a Nobel Prize in Physiology last year,” he said in a statement.

Paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of the French research agency CNRS said it was “completely justified” to award Paabo a Nobel Prize in medicine.

“We must not forget that medicine is the job of keeping people in good health, so we have to understand biology first,” she told AFP.

Paabo himself provided an example of this in 2020, when he showed that people with a certain Neanderthal DNA snippet were at higher risk of developing more severe symptoms of Covid-19.

The research could point to a possible reason why Covid has often proven to be more deadly in places like South Asia, where many people have the DNA segment, compared to Africa, where it is far less common.

However, the research is unlikely to lead to a new Covid treatment or approach.

And it’s “just a small, secondary issue” of Paabo’s extensive research, Geigl said.

However, it serves as an example of how paleogenetics interweaves the present with the distant past.

“We can, for example, understand which genes enabled adaptation in the past and which are therefore important for our current health,” said genetic anthropologist Evelyne Heyer of France’s National Museum of Natural History, naming in particular the case of diabetes.

But in a way, it was this unique blend of past and present that plunged the field into crisis in the early 2000s, a decade after it first rose to prominence.

Numerous paleogenetic treatises have been shown to be incorrect because DNA from modern humans had been inadvertently mixed with samples from ancient humans.

Apparently, researchers had found it difficult to avoid contaminating their samples with their own DNA, which was not a problem for paleogeneticists working on animals.

With the discipline in question, Paabo and other researchers paved the way for the development of more reliable and advanced techniques.

Now, paleogeneticists have created a vast library of knowledge that traces the recent evolution of our species, providing insight not only into medical matters but also into social issues such as migration.

“We have thousands of ancient genomes that have been published, not only from Neanderthals but also from more recent humans,” Heyer said.

“They make us show that we all have migrant ancestry, that we are a patchwork quilt,” she added.

“It’s fundamental to how our species sees itself.”

Paabo said in an interview published by the Nobels on Monday, “It’s interesting to imagine if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years, how would that affect us?”

Would there be “racism against Neanderthals because they were different from us”?