A scientific lecture entitled "Nobel Medicine 2022 and Neanderthal Man" was held in the School of Biology of the College of Science.

A scientific lecture on the subject of introducing the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022 was held by Dr. Hamed Vahdati Nesab, the Head of Department of Archeology of Tarbiat Modares University on November 28, 2022, at the School of Biology of University of Tehran  with the presence of professors and students.

In this speech, it was mentioned that before, the recipients of the most important prize in the field of medical science, i.e. the Nobel Medicine Prizes, were always scientists and researchers active in various aspects of treatment. But the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine is an important exception.

The winner of this award is Professor Svante Paabo (human paleogeneticist) with Swedish nationality from Max Planck Institute.

Paabo is one of the founders of the emerging science of paleo-genetics, which since 1997 has been continuously researching the methods of extracting DNA from ancient bones, especially extinct human forms such as Neanderthal and Denisovan.

The result of more than two decades of research by him and his colleagues has been the successful extraction of the ancient genome from the mentioned humans in many cases and comparing it with the genome of ancient and modern intelligent humans.

Paabo and his colleagues have clearly shown that, contrary to the previous idea, modern humans (intelligent humans) and two extinct humans, Neanderthal and Denisova, are not two separate human species, but have been able to interbreed and exchange genes with each other .

For this reason, they should be classified under one biological species (and of course different subspecies).

His research has so far shown that all people on the planet have between 1 and 4% Neanderthal gene in their genome.

This discovery has opened a new window on the story of the origin and distribution of intelligent humans.