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Hello, everybody from Wondery Welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm your host Patrick Weimann, thanks for joining me.

So we're going to do something a little bit different today, since we are nearing the

end of this season on prehistory and early history, I thought it would be really fun to

do a mailbag episode.

I'm sure that tons of people have had questions about various things over the course of this

season and it has been forever since I've done one of these.

I make more scripted episodes and interviews that I used to, which leaves less space for

things like this and the book club episodes we used to do, but I would be remiss if I just

never answered questions that people have.

So without further ado, here we go.

First up, we have a question from Apollonia.

With the Nobel Prize news, what are your thoughts on ancient DNA?

Have archaeogenetic studies informed your thinking on the ancient world?

So this is a question about the Finnish geneticist Svante Pavo, who just won the Nobel Prize in

Physiology or Medicine for unlocking the Neanderthal genome.

So a little over 10 years ago, Svante Pavo and his team at the Max Planck Institute published

really groundbreaking bit of work in which they extracted not mitochondrial DNA, not

Y chromosome information, but actual nuclear DNA from a Neanderthal fossil.

And they were able to sequence the entire genome.

...