The paleontologist Ignacio Martínez Mendizábal joins the ICMM Colloquia Cycle with the talk 'Svante Pääbo, a revolutionary of Human Evolution'

The researcher, a professor at the University of Alcalá de Henares, will talk about the work of Svante Pääbo, Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022.

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Professor Ignacio Martínez Mendizábal, the main co-investigator of the Atapuerca Research Project and recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research in 1997, will be visiting the Materials Science Institute in Madrid on Tuesday, June 6th, to participate in the Colloquia series.

Martínez Mendizábal will present to us the importance of the work of Professor Svante Pääbo, Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine 2022, in the study of human evolution, particularly about the investigations carried out at the Atapuerca site. Pääbo was awarded the prestigious prize last year for "his discoveries on the genome of extinct hominids and human evolution," as highlighted by the Swedish Academy, which awarded this category of the Nobel Prize for the first time for work on human evolution.

Pääbo's work has been focused on the retrieval of DNA from human fossils, which has been essential in understanding the genomes of known extinct species, such as Neanderthals, but also in revealing the existence of new species (such as the Denisovans) and confirming something that was already suspected: that Homo sapiens had sex and descendants with these other species when they coexisted thousands of years ago.

The Nobel Prize jury described Pääbo's research as "transcendental" because "it has given rise to a new scientific discipline: paleogenomics." "By revealing the genetic differences between modern humans and extinct hominids, his discoveries allow us to investigate what makes us genuinely human," highlighted the award's organizers in a press release. In 2018, Pääbo received the Princess of Asturias Award for his work in human evolution.

On the other hand, Martínez Mendizábal has been a professor at the University of Alcalá since 2021, a winner of the Princess of Asturias Award in 1997 for his work at Atapuerca, and the author of several popular science books with Juan Luis Arsuaga. He has also worked alongside the recently honored Pääbo. Throughout his many years, he has achieved significant research projects and become a renowned science communicator for all audiences.

He is also the director of the Chair of Evolutionary Otoacoustics and Paleoanthropology at HM Hospitals in collaboration with the University of Alcalá (UAH), which was created with a dual purpose. The first is to continue researching in Atapuerca to understand the relationship between hearing and language and, thus, discover the evolutionary process that modified the human ear to adapt it to spoken language. The second focuses on the evolution of the anatomy and physiology of the ear and its applications in otolaryngological clinics, that is, concerning patients with hearing loss and other auditory pathologies.