Swedish scientist Svante Paabo has won the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology Monday for his “discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”

The award was announced at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

“Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova,” The Nobel Prize committee said on Monday.  “Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.”

Mr Paabo, son of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergstrom, was credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to examine DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.

Last year’s joint awardees were California scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries on how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

On Tuesday, the physics prize will be announced, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday, and the economics award on October 10.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on December 10. The money comes from a legacy left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.