While nowhere near his first visit to his family's homeland, Pääbo's most recent trip to Estonia was for a special reason: the University of Tartu awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Pääbo, known as one of the founders of paleogenetics, earned the honors "for his remarkable achievements in the study of human evolution" as well as inspiring, training and integrating University of Tartu researchers "into the international interdisciplinary community of researchers in the biological and cultural evolution of humans."

While here, he also gave a lecture at the Estonian Academy of Sciences (ETA) in Tallinn, where he has served as a foreign member since 2019.

Despite very strong ties with Estonia, Pääbo did not grow up speaking the language. His mother, Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo, was one of tens of thousands that fled Soviet occupation by boat in 1944. A decade later, she gave birth to Svante in Sweden.

He said that while his family closely followed events in Estonia, his mother chose to raise him speaking Swedish.

"I think it was a sort of conscious decision by her and some other people in our social circles that the future was in Sweden," he said, admitting he has later felt some regret about it.

"I visited Estonia during Soviet times — I worked as a guide for Swedish students here and in Russia," he recalled. "So it would have been nice to speak Estonian."

While his vocabulary is limited, it nonetheless includes several swear words picked up from relatives, "so I should not say them on television."

'My mom took my interests seriously'

Pääbo credits his mother with fueling his curiosity as a child. "I think what was important was that she took the interests that [I] developed very seriously," he said.

"So when I — as many kids — got interested in archaeology, and the Stone Age, and runic stones, she would drive me around Stockholm on weekends and I would take pictures and measure runic stones and things like that," he recalled.

Karin Pääbo took her son to Egypt as a teen, which he admits had a major impact on him — it sparked his interest in Egyptology, which he later went on to study at Uppsala University.

Svante Pääbo also studied medicine, and in 1985 he became the first scientist to extract DNA from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy.

His research now focuses on Neanderthal and other ancient hominid genomes — and their traces in human DNA. Those discoveries earned him the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

"I think what's really striking is what a cultural phenomenon this prize is — that you get so much attention, so many invitations, so many suggestions to do things," he admitted.

"You really have to learn to say no to many, many nice invitations that before '22 I would have been happy to accept," he continued, adding that his own work and family have to come first.

According to Pääbo, being a Nobel Prize winner doesn't make you more qualified to speculate on certain topics than anyone else. This includes questions about the future of the human species.

Even so, he considers himself an optimist, convinced that people will figure out in phases how to manage even the darker sides of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI).

"I'm not worried about our species," Pääbo said. "We will of course go through troubling times in the future, as we have in the past, but what's amazing with modern humans, compared to our closest relatives, is how adapted we are — adapted to living in different climates; we've survived lots of bad epidemics."

Speculating about the future of human evolution, he added, is pointless. "Biological and genetic evolution is so slow, so what matters is culture, and society," he said. "That is what we should think about and improve."

A noble baptism

The child of an extramarital affair, Pääbo and his mother watched his father, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström, win the 1982 Nobel Prize on TV. Forty years later, his own Nobel Prize win in the same category was met with more lively celebration.

"It was actually a holiday in Germany, but I went to the lab, and there were lots of people there, and they ended up throwing me in the institute pond," Pääbo recalled. "They have a tradition that when you pass your PhD, you're thrown in the water. So now the students threw me into the pond."

Estonia, Pääbo said, has done "very, very well scientifically" since regaining independence in 1991, especially compared with other countries with similar pasts. He pointed to the country's biobanks as a standout example, praising Estonia's scientific output and strong track record with European grants.

Asked what his "favorite Estonian thing" is, Pääbo admitted that this is actually a "Big Question."

He said he loves Estonia as a country where people feel very connected with one another and with the country. But, he added, it has also really shown since regaining independence "that one can be versatile and change science, change society, in a very positive and successful way."

He also pointed to Estonia's major transformation as an example that bigger ex-socialist countries often look to.

The most Estonian thing in his childhood? "Kohupiimakook," he said without hesitation, referring to a popular Estonian curd cheesecake. "This is what my mom made me for my birthday."

For more of Pääbo's reflections on his past, Estonia's present and whether humans could ever really bring back dire wolves or woolly mammoths, watch the full ETV "Ringvaade" interview below.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!