Dorcas Cummings Lecture
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Dr. Svante Pääbo presented the Dorcas Cummings lecture entitled “The Genetic Legacy of Neanderthals” to friends and neighbors of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Symposium participants on Saturday, May 30, 2015. Dr. Pääbo is director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. What follows is an abbreviated and edited transcript of his lecture.
Thank you for the honor of giving this lecture; it is a great pleasure for me to be here.
Our laboratory is interested in the Neanderthals. As you know, Neanderthals were a robust form of humans that appear in the fossil record of Europe and western Asia around 400 thousand years ago and existed in that part of the world until they disappeared about 30–40 thousand years ago, around the time modern humans appeared in Europe and Asia. There are at least two reasons why we should be interested in Neanderthals. …
