Harvard’s SoHP and MHAAM take deep satisfaction in the Nobel Prize’s Committee’s decision to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo, pioneer in the study of ancient DNA to reconstruct the human past. Svante is director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, whose Department of Archaeogenetics, led by Johannes Krause, is our European partner in the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean. Johannes, SoHP’s David Reich and Nick Patterson have all been major collaborators, contributors, and co-authors in the discoveries that, as the Nobel Committee emphasizes, help us understand what makes today’s homo sapiens --us-- unique. Svante’s seminal breakthroughs are leading and guiding SoHP and MHAAM in its ongoing investigations here at Harvard and at our sister institution in Leipzig.