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Paleogenetics uses dormant snippets of DNA to discover more about the history of humanity's ancient ancestors

While some may have been surprised that the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a paleogeneticist Monday, researchers say understanding our distant ancestors helps explain modern human health — even when it comes to Covid.

New Nobel laureate Svante Paabo is considered the father of both paleogenetics and paleogenomics, which aims to reconstruct the genetic information of long extinct human relatives.

But the prize may have led some to wonder why a pioneer in this field won the Nobel in medicine.

For example, what is the medical benefit of knowing that modern humans have an average of around two percent Neanderthal DNA, one of Paabo’s great discoveries?

For the second year running, the scientists behind mRNA vaccines were among the odds-maker’s favourites, with millions around the world being aware of the technology after getting it jabbed into their arms.

But the Nobels, which tend to reward research from decades in the past, chose Paabo.

“This revolutionary research in genetics and evolution falls within the range of topics that could and should be recognised by the Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize,” said David Pendlebury, research head at analytics company Clarivate’s ISI institute.

“It is, however, not an award for a discovery relevant to clinical medicine, which many anticipated this year after a Nobel Prize focusing on physiology last year,” he said in a statement.

– ‘Completely justified’ –

Paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of the French research agency CNRS said it was “completely justified” to give Paabo a Nobel Prize in medicine.

“We must not forget that medicine is the exercise of keeping human beings in good health, so we must first understand biology,” she told AFP.

Paabo himself provided an example of this in 2020, when he showed that humans with a particular snippet of Neanderthal DNA have a higher risk of getting more serious symptoms from Covid-19.

The research could point towards a potential reason why Covid has often proved deadlier in places like South Asia, where many people have the DNA segment, compared to Africa, where it is far less common.

But the research is unlikely to contribute to new Covid treatment or approach. 

And it “is only a small, secondary subject” of Paabo’s vast amount of research, Geigl said.

It does however serve as an example of how paleogenetics weaves together the present with the distant past.

“We can understand, for example, what genes have made it possible to adapt in the past, and therefore which are important for our current health,” said genetic anthropologist Evelyne Heyer of France’s National Museum of Natural History, citing in particular the case of diabetes.

– Crisis in the field –

But, in a way, it was this unique mix of past and present that plunged the field into crisis in the early 2000s, a decade after first coming to prominence.

Numerous paleogenetics papers were discovered to be incorrect, because DNA from modern-day humans had accidentally been mixed in with samples from ancient humans.

It had apparently proved difficult for researchers to avoid contaminating their samples with their own DNA, which was not a problem for paleogeneticists working on animals. 

With the discipline brought into question, Paabo and other researchers led to the way to develop more reliable and advanced techniques.

Now, paleogeneticists have created a vast library of knowledge tracing the recent evolution of our species that gives insight not just into medical concerns, but also into social issues such as migration.

“We have thousands of ancient genomes that have been published, not just of Neanderthals but also of more recent humans,” Heyer said.

“They let us to show that we all have migrant ancestors, that we are a patchwork tapestry,” she added.

“It’s fundamental to how our species sees itself.”

Paabo said in an interview released by the Nobels on Monday that “it’s interesting to think if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years, how would that influence us?”

Would there be “racism against Neanderthals, because they were different from us?”

A protestor in Kinshasa accuses the world of climate 'hypocrisy'

Warning “no-one will escape” a worsening crisis, DR Congo led calls on Monday for a surge in funding to brake global heating and fight its impacts at the start of pre-COP27 climate talks in Kinshasa. 

The haggle comes ahead of COP27 — the UN’s 27th summit-level gathering on climate change, which is due to take place in Egypt next month. 

At opening ceremonies in the DRC’s parliament building, Congolese Environment Minister Eve Bazaiba called on countries to respect financial pledges and endorse plans to help compensate climate-inflicted damage.

She added that money to protect carbon-absorbing rain forests — of which the DRC has vast tracts — should be viewed not as aid but as an investment in humanity’s future.

“Unless a global effort is made … no-one will escape,” Bazaiba warned. “We all breathe the same air”. 

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry also stressed the need for more money, noting an unfulfilled promise — dating back to COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 — to provide developing countries with $100 billion dollars a year to fight climate change. 

“The picture is not reassuring,” he said.  

Deputy UN Secretary-General Amina Mohammed offered a gloomy update on the battle today.

“All indicators on climate are heading in the wrong direction,” she said.

Current funding for climate adaptation is a “pittance” compared to the likely scale of future needs, she said. 

– Damages –

Delegates from over 50 countries are attending the two-day informal talks in Kinshasa, including US climate envoy John Kerry. The event winds up on Wednesday with side discussions.

Kerry, after meeting Bazaiba in the afternoon, said he was convinced it was possible to protect the environment “but also to have appropriate development and job creation in the region”.

No formal announcements are expected in what is billed as a ground-clearing exercise ahead of the next month’s conference, taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh from November 6-18. 

Greater support from wealthier countries, historically the world’s biggest carbon polluters, to their poorer counterparts is expected to dominate the talks. 

But post-pandemic economic strains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have cast a pall over the money question.

The last UN climate summit, COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, reaffirmed the goal — agreed in Paris in 2015 — of limiting the rise in the Earth’s average temperature to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C.

However, the latter goal may already be beyond reach as the Earth’s temperature is already 1.2C higher than before the Industrial Revolution. 

Poorer countries had also pushed at Glasgow for a financial mechanism to address losses and damage caused by climate change. 

But richer states rejected the call and the participants agreed instead to start a “dialogue” on financial compensation for damages.  

– ‘We also need bread’ –

Egypt, as host of COP27, has made implementing the pledge to curb global heating the priority of the November summit. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo, for its part, is pushing the message that it can act as a “solution country” for climate change due to its vast rainforests, which act as a carbon sink. 

Around 30 billion tonnes of carbon are stored across the Congo Basin, researchers estimated in a study for Nature in 2016. The figure is roughly equivalent to three years of global emissions.

However, the central African nation in July launched an auction for 30 oil and gas blocs — ignoring warnings from environmentalists that drilling could harm ecosystems and release vast amounts of heat-trapping gases. 

Bazaiba, the environment minister, told pre-COP27 delegates that Africa was facing a dilemma since the continent has contributed so little to climate change and yet has fossil-fuel resources that could alleviate poverty. 

“What should we do in this circumstance, let our children and small children die of hunger?” she asked, as applause rung out in the hall of the parliament building.

“As much as we need oxygen, we also need bread,” she said, 

Nobel winner Svante Paabo's research gave rise to a new scientific discipline called paleogenomics

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and discovered the previously unknown hominin Denisova, on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize.

Paabo’s research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline called paleogenomics, and has “generated new understanding of our evolutionary history”, the Nobel committee said.

“By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” it said in a statement.

Paabo — the founder and director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig — 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,” the jury said.

One such example is that Covid-19 patients with a snippet of Neanderthal DNA run a higher risk of severe complications from the disease, Paabo found in a 2020 study.

Paabo told reporters he was surprised when the committee called to tell him he had won.

“At first I thought this is probably an elaborate prank done by people in my (research) group. But then it sounded a little bit too serious to me so I sort of accepted the fact”, he said.

Paabo, 67, takes home the award sum of 10 million kronor ($901,500).

He is the son of Sune Bergstrom, a Swede who won the 1982 Nobel Medicine Prize for discovering prostaglandins — biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions and other physiological phenomena.

In his 2014 memoir “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”, Paabo wrote that he was conceived as a result of a secret extra-marital affair.

He later told The Guardian outlet that Bergstrom’s “official” family knew nothing of his or his mother’s existence, the Estonian chemist Karin Paabo, until 2005 after Bergstrom’s death.

Paabo also wrote in his memoir that he “had always thought of myself as gay” until he met the woman who would become his wife, primatologist Linda Vigilant, who also works at the Max Planck Institute. He now identifies as bisexual.

– Achieved ‘the seemingly impossible’ –

Homo sapiens are known to have first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. 

Our closest known relatives, Neanderthals, developed outside Africa and populated Europe and Western Asia from around 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they became extinct.

That means that about 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in large parts of Eurasia for tens of thousands of years.

“The last 40,000 years is quite unique in human history in that we are the only form of humans around. Until that time there were almost always other types of humans that existed”, Paabo told the Nobel website.

In order to study the relationship between present-day humans and extinct Neanderthals, DNA needed to be sequenced from archaic specimens with only trace amounts of DNA left after thousands of years.

In 1990, Paabo managed to sequence a bit of mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of bone.

“For the first time, we had access to a sequence from an extinct relative”, the Nobel jury said.

Comparisons with contemporary humans and chimpanzees showed that Neanderthals were genetically distinct.

Paabo then “accomplished the seemingly impossible”, the committee said, when he published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010.

It showed that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived around 800,000 years ago. 

Paabo and his team were able to show that DNA sequences from Neanderthals were more similar to those from contemporary humans originating from Europe or Asia than those from Africa.

“This means that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their millennia of coexistence,” the Nobel jury said.

In modern day humans with European or Asian descent, around one to four percent of the genome originates from Neanderthals.

– New addition to family tree –

In 2008, Paabo and his team went on to sequence a 40,000-year-old bone fragment found in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia. 

It contained exceptionally well-preserved DNA.

“The results caused a sensation — the DNA sequence was unique when compared to all known sequences from Neanderthals and present-day humans,” the Nobel jury said.

Paabo had discovered a previously unknown hominin, given the name Denisova.

Comparisons showed the gene flow had also occurred between Denisovans and Homo sapiens.

In the same cave, palaeontologists later discovered the fossil of a young girl who was part Neanderthal, part Denisovan, proving the two species interbred.

Paabo’s research proved that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, at least two extinct hominin populations inhabited Eurasia — Neanderthals in western Eurasia, and Denisovans in the eastern parts.

Boats were brought ashore ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Orlene on Mexico's Pacific coast

Hurricane Orlene made landfall on Monday on Mexico’s Pacific coast, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and a risk of flooding and landslides, forecasters said.

Orlene came ashore south of the beachside city of Mazatlan in Sinaloa state as a Category One hurricane — the weakest on a scale of five.

At 1500 GMT, the storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour and moving inland toward the northeast, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).

Boats had been brought ashore in Mazatlan ahead of Orlene’s arrival, and businesses boarded up windows and laid down sandbags in case of flooding.

Orlene had strengthened to a powerful Category 4 hurricane on Sunday in the Pacific, prompting warnings for inhabitants of at-risk areas to take refuge in temporary shelters.

But the storm gradually lost strength as it approached the coast and was expected to quickly lose its hurricane force after making landfall.

“Rapid weakening is expected during the next 12 to 24 hours as Orlene moves inland,” the NHC said.

“Orlene is forecast to weaken to a tropical storm by this afternoon, and dissipate tonight or early Tuesday,” it added.

Tropical cyclones hit Mexico every year on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, usually between May and November.

In October 1997, Hurricane Paulina hit Mexico’s Pacific coast as a Category 4 storm, leaving more than 200 dead.

This picture from the University of Oxford/Max Planck Institute shows a bone fragment of 'Denisova 11', evidence of interbreeding of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan, found in 2012 by Russian archaeologists in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

Little is known of the mysterious Denisovans. These distant relatives of the Neanderthals roamed eastern and southern Eurasia but left little trace of their time on Earth.

“Hominin Denisova” was discovered by Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, the winner of this year’s Nobel prize in medicine. 

In 2012, Paabo and his team sequenced the DNA of a remarkably well-preserved fragment of bone, 40,000 years old, found four years earlier in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia.

The result was astounding — they had come across an entirely novel hominin, distinct from Neanderthals and even more from Homo sapiens, aka modern humans.

The Denisovans shared a common ancestor with the Neanderthals until their populations diverged 380,000 to 470,000 years ago. 

This was much later than the split between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans, which occurred between 550,000 and 760,000 years ago.

In the same cave, paleontologists later discovered the fossil of a young girl who was part Neanderthal, part Denisovan, proving that these two archaic species interbred.

But while we know the Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, we have little idea as to when our other closest evolutionary relative went extinct.

We don’t know what the Denisovans looked like either as they left only rare fossilised traces of their time on Earth other than the fragments found in Siberia and a jawbone discovered on the Tibetan Plateau in 2019.

The work of Paabo and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have nonetheless shed some light on our mysterious ancestor.

By comparing DNA sequences, they found a “gene flow” between both Denisovan and Neanderthals, and between Denisovans and modern humans.

In other words, before they went extinct, Denisovans also interbred with our species. 

Up to six percent of Denisovan DNA is still found in present-day humans in Asia-Pacific and southeast Asia — Australian Aborigines, Melanesians and the Negritos of the Philippines — suggesting our far-distant relative roamed over a vast swathe of east and south Eurasia.

Neanderthals, by contrast, lived in western Eurasia.

Scientists believe the ancient ancestors of today’s Melanesians interbred with Denisovans from southeast Asia, far from the frozen mountains of Siberia and Tibet.

Proof that the Denisovans had spread as far as the warm tropics of Asia was lacking until a missing link — a child’s tooth at least 130,000 years old — was discovered in a cave in Laos in 2018.

One of the biggest remaining mysteries is why modern humans were so successful in their expansion and why the Denisovans and Neanderthals went extinct, after having adapted to a Eurasian environment for several hundred thousand years.

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who has won the Nobel Medicine Prize for sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for using DNA to reveal the link between humans and Neanderthals, drew early inspiration from his Nobel laureate father.

However Paabo later learned that his father had been living a “double life”, and his existence had been kept a secret from his father’s other family. 

Paabo, 67, was awarded the medicine Nobel for a long list of achievements including sequencing the Neanderthal genome for the first time and discovering the existence of a distant human relative called the Denisovans. 

He was born in Stockholm in 1955 to Estonian chemist Karin Paabo and Sune Bergstrom, a biochemist who won the Nobel Medicine Prize in 1982. His father died in 2004.

In his 2014 memoir “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”, Paabo wrote that he gained inspiration to study medicine at Sweden’s Uppsala University from his father, who had previously been a medical doctor.

Later he learned that his father “had two families, one of which did not know about the other,” he wrote.

“I had grown up as the secret extra-marital son of Sune Bergstrom,” Paabo wrote, adding that he had “only occasionally” seen his father as an adult.

Paabo also followed in his father’s footsteps by studying biochemistry, earning a PhD at Uppsala University for using DNA research to study a protein of adenovirus, common viruses which cause cold-like symptoms.

But Paabo had long been fascinated with mummies and “could not quite shake off my romantic fascination with ancient Egypt,” he wrote in his memoir.

– An impossible task –

The crossover of his medical research using DNA and preoccupation with mummies put him on the path that would become his life’s work.

“Could it be possible to study ancient DNA sequences and thereby clarify how ancient Egyptians were related to one another and to people today?” he asked in his book.

“Such questions were breathtaking. Surely they must have already occurred to someone else.”

Finding that they had not, Paabo sought his own answers.

It proved a difficult task, because there are only trace amounts of DNA left in ancients remains.

He first made international news in 1985, when he published research that found a DNA fragment in the mummy of a 2,400-year-old child.

Paabo then turned his focus toward Neanderthals when he was recruited by Germany’s Munich University in 1995.

A year later, he managed to sequence some mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of Neanderthal bone. 

He then became the head of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

He accomplished the “seemingly impossible task” of publishing the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010, according to a statement from the Nobel Assembly.

The research surprised by the scientific world by showing that Neanderthal genomes are still present in one to four percent of humans from European or Asian descent.

“We find traces of their DNA everywhere,” Paabo told AFP in 2018.

– ‘Normal human beings’ –

Also in 2010, Paabo and his team revealed the existence of Denisovans, an extinct human relative, just by sequencing the DNA from a 40,000-year-old finger bone.

Only a year before these breakthroughs were published, Paabo developed potentially life-threatening blood clots in his lungs.

While researching his illness, “to my amazement I stumbled upon references to my father’s work in 1943”, Paabo wrote in his memoir.

His father had “elucidated the chemical structure of herapain,” the drug “which had perhaps saved my life,” he wrote.

In an interview published by the Nobels on Monday, he said that having a Nobel-winning parent may have also given him confidence by showing that “such people are normal human beings and it’s not such an amazing thing”.

“You don’t put your parents on a pedestal,” he added.

Paabo wrote in his memoir that he “had always thought of myself as gay,” before meeting the woman who would become his wife.

He now identifies as bisexual and has two children with primatologist Linda Vigilant, who also works at the Max Planck Institute.

Nobel winner Svante Paabo's research gave rise to a new scientific discipline called paleogenomics

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and discovered the previously unknown hominin Denisova, on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize.

Paabo’s research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline called paleogenomics, and has “generated new understanding of our evolutionary history”, the Nobel committee said.

“By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” it said in a statement.

Paabo — the founder and director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig — 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,” the jury said.

One such example is that Covid-19 patients with a snippet of Neanderthal DNA run a higher risk of severe complications from the disease, Paabo found in a 2020 study.

Paabo told prize organisers Monday that he was “gulping down his last cup of tea” before picking up his young daughter when the committee called him Monday to tell him his research was being honoured.

He was surprised, he said. “I somehow did not think that this would really qualify for a Nobel Prize”.

Paabo, 67, takes home the award sum of 10 million kronor ($901,500).

He is one of only a handful of Nobel science laureates to win the prize alone. Major scientific discoveries are usually awarded to two or three people to reflect large team collaborations.

Paabo is the son of Sune Bergstrom, a Swede who won the 1982 Nobel Medicine Prize for discovering prostaglandins — biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions and other physiological phenomena.

In his 2014 memoir “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”, Paabo wrote that he was conceived as a result of a secret extra-marital affair.

He later told The Guardian outlet that Bergstrom’s “official” family knew nothing of his or his mother’s existence, the Estonian chemist Karin Paabo, until after Bergstrom’s death in 2005.

Paabo also wrote in his memoir that he “had always thought of myself as gay” until he met the woman who would become his wife, primatologist Linda Vigilant, who also works at the Max Planck Institute.

– Achieved ‘the seemingly impossible’ –

Homo sapiens are known to have first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. 

Our closest known relatives, Neanderthals, developed outside Africa and populated Europe and Western Asia from around 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they became extinct.

That means that about 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in large parts of Eurasia for tens of thousands of years.

“The last 40,000 years is quite unique in human history in that we are the only form of humans around. Until that time there were almost always other types of humans that existed”, Paabo said in the interview with prize organisers.

In order to study the relationship between present-day humans and extinct Neanderthals, DNA needed to be sequenced from archaic specimens with only trace amounts of DNA left after thousands of years.

In 1990, Paabo managed to sequence a bit of mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of bone.

“For the first time, we had access to a sequence from an extinct relative”, the Nobel jury said.

Comparisons with contemporary humans and chimpanzees showed that Neanderthals were genetically distinct.

Paabo then “accomplished the seemingly impossible”, the committee said, when he published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010.

It showed that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived around 800,000 years ago. 

Paabo and his team were able to show that DNA sequences from Neanderthals were more similar to those from contemporary humans originating from Europe or Asia than those from Africa.

“This means that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their millennia of coexistence,” the Nobel jury said.

In modern day humans with European or Asian descent, around one to four percent of the genome originates from Neanderthals.

– New addition to family tree –

In 2008, Paabo and his team went on to sequence a 40,000-year-old bone fragment found in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia. 

It contained exceptionally well-preserved DNA.

“The results caused a sensation — the DNA sequence was unique when compared to all known sequences from Neanderthals and present-day humans,” the Nobel jury said.

Paabo had discovered a previously unknown hominin, which was given the name Denisova.

Comparisons showed the gene flow had also occurred between Denisova and Homo sapiens.

As a result of Paabo’s research, we now know that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, at least two extinct hominin populations inhabited Eurasia — Neanderthals lived in western Eurasia, whereas Denisovans populated the eastern parts of the continent.

Amazigh man Moha Ouchaali sits in his tent near the village of Amellagou where Morocco's last nomads live

In the blistering desert of Morocco, the country’s last Berber nomads, the Amazigh, say their ancient lifestyle is under threat as climate change brings ever-more intense droughts.  

“Everything has changed,” said Moha Ouchaali, his wrinkled features framed by a black turban. “I don’t recognise myself anymore in the world of today. Even nature is turning against us.” 

Ouchaali, an Amazigh man in his 50s, has set up an encampment near a dry riverbed in barren hills about 280 kilometres (175 miles) east of Marrakesh. 

Amid the rocky, arid landscape near the village of Amellagou, he and his family have pitched two black woollen tents, lined with old animal fodder bags and fabric scraps.

One is for sleeping and hosting guests, the other serves as a kitchen.

“Water has become hard to find. Temperatures are going up and the drought is so harsh, but we can’t do much,” said Ouchaali.

His tribe, the Ait Aissa Izem, has spent centuries roaming the country to find food for their animals, but their way of life is steadily disappearing.

According to the last census, just 25,000 people in Morocco were nomadic in 2014, down by two-thirds in just a decade.

“We’re exhausted,” Ouchaali’s 45-year-old wife Ida said emotionally. “Before, we managed to live decently, but all these droughts, more and more intense, make our lives complicated. Without water we can’t do anything.”

– ‘Last nail in coffin’ –

This year has seen Morocco’s worst drought in four decades.

Rainfall is set to decline by 11 percent and average temperatures set to rise by 1.3 percent by 2050, according to forecasts from the Ministry of Agriculture.

“Nomads have always been seen as a barometer of climate change,” said anthropologist Ahmed Skounti.

“If these people, used to living in extreme conditions, can’t resist the intensity of global warming, that means things are bad.”

The drying up of water resources was “the last nail in the coffin for nomads”, he added.

In easier times, the Ait Aissa Izem would pass the summer in the relatively cool mountain valley of Imilchil, before heading to the area around regional capital Errachidia for the winter.

“That’s ancient history,” Ouchaali said, sitting in his tent and taking a sip of sweet Moroccan tea. “Today we go wherever there’s a bit of water left, to try to save the animals.”

Severe water shortages have even pushed some nomads to take the rare step of taking out loans to feed their livestock, their most vital asset.

“I’ve gone into debt to buy food for my animals so they don’t starve to death,” said Ahmed Assni, 37, sitting by a tiny, almost dried-out stream near Amellagou.

Saeed Ouhada said the difficulties had pushed him to find accommodation for his wife and children in Amellagou, while he stays with his parents in a camp on the edge of the town.

“Being a nomad isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “I’ll keep at it because I have to. My parents are old but they refuse to live in a town.” 

Driss Skounti, elected to represent nomads in the region, said the area used to have around 460 tents. Today, they don’t even add up to a tenth of that number.

– ‘Tired of fighting’ –

Some Moroccan nomads have given up their ancient lifestyle altogether — and not just because of the ever-worsening climate.

“I was tired of fighting,” said Haddou Oudach, 67, who settled permanently in Er-Rich in 2010.

“We’ve become outcasts from society. I can’t even imagine what nomads are going through today.”

Moha Haddachi, the head of an association for the Ait Aissa Izem nomads, said social and economic changes were making a nomadic lifestyle ever-more difficult. 

The scarcity of pastures due to land privatisation and agricultural investment also contributes to the difficulties, he said.

“Agricultural investors now dominate the spaces where nomads used to graze their herds.”

Nomads also face hostility from some villagers, angered by those camping in their region despite officially belonging to other provinces.

A law was passed in 2019 to delineate where nomads and sedentary farmers could graze their animals, but “nobody applies it”, Haddachi said.

Former nomad Oudach was despondent about “this era of selfishness where everyone thinks only of themselves”. 

“It wasn’t always like this, we used to be welcomed everywhere we went,” he said.

Embarking on a life of nomadism offers little to young people.

Houda Ouchaali, 19, says she can’t stand watching her parents “suffering and battling just to survive”.

“The new generation wants to turn the page on nomadism,” she said.

She now lives with an uncle in Er-Rich and is looking for professional training to allow her to “build a future” and escape the “stigmatising gaze that city people often have for nomads”.

Driss Skounti said he had little hope for the future of nomadism.

“Nomadic life has an identity and a tradition steeped in history,” he said, “but is doomed to disappear within 10 years.”

kao-agr/par/jsa/fz

A protestor in Kinshasa accuses the world of climate 'hypocrisy'

Warning “no-one will escape” a worsening crisis, DR Congo led calls on Monday for a surge in funding to brake global heating and fight its impacts at the start of pre-COP27 climate talks in Kinshasa. 

The haggle comes ahead of COP27 — the UN’s 27th summit-level gathering on climate change, which is due to take place in Egypt next month. 

At opening ceremonies in the DRC’s parliament building, Congolese Environment Minister Eve Bazaiba called on countries to respect financial pledges and endorse plans to help compensate climate-inflicted damage.

She added that money to protect carbon-absorbing rain forests — of which the DRC has vast tracts — should be viewed not as aid but as an investment in humanity’s future.

“Unless a global effort is made … no-one will escape,” Bazaiba warned. “We all breathe the same air”. 

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry also stressed the need for more money, noting an unfulfilled promise — dating back to COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 — to provide developing countries with $100 billion dollars a year to fight climate change. 

“The picture is not reassuring,” he said.  

Deputy UN Secretary-General Amina Mohammed offered a gloomy update on the battle today.

“All indicators on climate are heading in the wrong direction,” she said.

Current funding for climate adaptation is a “pittance” compared to the likely scale of future needs, she said. 

– Damages –

Delegates from over 50 countries are attending the two-day informal talks in Kinshasa, including US climate envoy John Kerry. The event winds up on Wednesday with side discussions.

No formal announcements are expected in what is billed as a ground-clearing exercise ahead of the next month’s conference, taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh from November 6-18. 

Greater support from wealthier countries, historically the world’s biggest carbon polluters, to their poorer counterparts is expected to dominate the talks. 

But post-pandemic economic strains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have cast a pall over the money question.

The last UN climate summit, COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, reaffirmed the goal — agreed in Paris in 2015 — of limiting the rise in the Earth’s average temperature to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C.

However, the latter goal may already be beyond reach as the Earth’s temperature is already 1.2C higher than before the Industrial Revolution. 

Poorer countries had also pushed at Glasgow for a financial mechanism to address losses and damage caused by climate change. 

But richer states rejected the call and the participants agreed instead to start a “dialogue” on financial compensation for damages.  

– ‘We also need bread’ –

Egypt, as host of COP27, has made implementing the pledge to curb global heating the priority of the November summit. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo, for its part, is pushing the message that it can act as a “solution country” for climate change due to its vast rainforests, which act as a carbon sink. 

Around 30 billion tonnes of carbon are stored across the Congo Basin, researchers estimated in a study for Nature in 2016. The figure is roughly equivalent to three years of global emissions.

However, the central African nation in July launched an auction for 30 oil and gas blocs — ignoring warnings from environmentalists that drilling could harm ecosystems and release vast amounts of heat-trapping gases. 

Bazaiba, the environment minister, told pre-COP27 delegates that Africa was facing a dilemma since the continent has contributed so little to climate change and yet has fossil-fuel resources that could alleviate poverty. 

“What should we do in this circumstance, let our children and small children die of hunger?” she asked, as applause rung out in the hall of the parliament building.

“As much as we need oxygen, we also need bread,” she said, 

Nobel winner Svante Paabo's research gave rise to a new scientific discipline called paleogenomics

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and discovered the previously unknown hominin Denisova, on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize.

Paabo’s research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline called paleogenomics, and has “generated new understanding of our evolutionary history”, the Nobel committee said.

“By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” it said in a statement.

Paabo — the founder and director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig — 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,” the jury said.

One such example is that Covid-19 patients with a snippet of Neanderthal DNA run a higher risk of severe complications from the disease, Paabo found in a 2020 study.

The secretary of the Nobel Medicine Prize committee, Thomas Perlmann, told reporters Paabo was “overwhelmed” and “speechless” on Monday when he called him in Leipzig, Germany, to share the good news.

Paabo, 67, takes home the award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor ($901,500).

He is one of the rare Nobel science laureates to win the prize alone. Major scientific discoveries are usually awarded to two or three people to reflect large team collaborations.

The last single medicine laureate was Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan in 2016.

Paabo is the son of Sune Bergstrom, a Swede who won the 1982 Nobel Medicine Prize for discovering prostaglandins — biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions and other physiological phenomena.

In his 2014 memoir “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”, Paabo wrote that he was the result of a secret extra-marital affair.

He later told The Guardian that Bergstrom’s “official” family knew nothing of his or his mother’s existence, the Estonian chemist Karin Paabo, until after Bergstrom’s death in 2005.

Paabo also wrote in his memoir that he “had always thought of myself as gay” until he met the woman who would become his wife, primatologist Linda Vigilant, who also works at the Max Planck Institute.

– Achieved ‘the seemingly impossible’ –

Homo sapiens are known to have first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. 

Our closest known relatives, Neanderthals, developed outside Africa and populated Europe and Western Asia from around 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they became extinct.

That means that about 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in large parts of Eurasia for tens of thousands of years.

In order to study the relationship between present-day humans and extinct Neanderthals, DNA needed to be sequenced from archaic specimens with only trace amounts of DNA left after thousands of years.

In 1990, Paabo managed to sequence a bit of mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of bone.

“For the first time, we had access to a sequence from an extinct relative”, the Nobel jury said.

Comparisons with contemporary humans and chimpanzees showed that Neanderthals were genetically distinct.

Paabo then “accomplished the seemingly impossible”, the Nobel committee said, when he published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010.

It showed that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived around 800,000 years ago. 

Paabo and his team were able to show that DNA sequences from Neanderthals were more similar to those from contemporary humans originating from Europe or Asia than those from Africa.

“This means that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their millennia of coexistence,” the Nobel jury said.

In modern day humans with European or Asian descent, around one to four percent of the genome originates from Neanderthals.

– New addition to family tree –

In 2008, Paabo and his team went on to sequence a 40,000-year-old bone fragment found in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia. 

It contained exceptionally well-preserved DNA.

“The results caused a sensation — the DNA sequence was unique when compared to all known sequences from Neanderthals and present-day humans.”

Paabo had discovered a previously unknown hominin, which was given the name Denisova.

Comparisons showed the gene flow had also occurred between Denisova and Homo sapiens.

As a result of Paabo’s research, we now know that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, at least two extinct hominin populations inhabited Eurasia — Neanderthals lived in western Eurasia, whereas Denisovans populated the eastern parts of the continent.