Neanderthal Man

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.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo

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Svante Paabo is the Mick Jagger of Recombinant DNA Anthropology. I know this because I saw him on an unrelated TV program and you could see the young female Neanderthal professor simply quiver in his presence.

So, it's probably not surprising that a surprisingly large portion of this book involves his personal life. I suspect that he imagined himself fighting the stereotype of cold, impersonal science with his personal reflections. Perhaps, but there was an awful lot of barely covered up infighting, concern about political correctness, and calculations about how not to be upstaged. Actually, in a way, that may be the more important historical angle; Paabo offers an insight into the culture of science as it is actually practiced.

On the other hand, there was really some personal information that we didn't need. Paabo lost a lot of empathy for me - and, in fact, reinforced the image of the out of touch science nerd - with his story about how he went from out of the closet homosexual to heterosexual parent by committing adultery with a married colleague, who was so cool with this cuckolding that he moved to Germany, took a job with Paabo, and, apparently, welcomes Paabo into the family.

Yuck!

Another large, large portion of the book is the inside story of how recombinant DNA research is done. Actually, I found this interesting because I've heard the terminology for years and Paabo was able to explain it. Nonetheless, this stuff went on for a long time. Again, though, as a history of the field, this book will probably be a treasure to future historians of science.

The gosh-wow! information was mostly relegated to the final chapters wherein we hear about Neanderthal gene flow into Homo Sapiens, e.g., all non-Africans have around 3% of the Neanderthal genetic information. Paabo was also the person who discovered that Denisovans were a new....species? sub-species? race?...it's not clear. Paabo explains:

“The final mappings didn't change the picture, and I became convinced that the Denisova girl was a member of a population that shared a common origin with Neanderthals, but that had  lived separately from the Neanderthals for at least as long as Finns today have been separated from, say, the San in southern Africa. Denisova DNA sequences tended to be a bit closer to those of Eurasians than to Africans, but less so than were the Neanderthal DNA sequences. This was best explained by a common ancestry for the Denisova girl and Neanderthals so that when Neanderthals mixed with modern humans, Eurasian ancestors inherited DNA sequences that were somewhat similar to Denisova DNA sequences just because the Neanderthals were related to the Denisova girl.”

That was probably the most surprising bit of the book. The Denisovans have been presented in the popular media as a completely new species, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I thought the book was interesting. It should have been a lot more tedious than I found it to be. However, it didn't have the attention grabbing, gosh-wow! interest that I expected. So, rather than 5 stars, I've rolled it back a star based on my subjective expectations. I suspect that for reader not looking for a deep dive into chemistry and lab techniques the rating will be much lower.