Svante P??bo, a Swedish scientist working in Germany, has won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for decoding the DNA of extinct hominins, a development that will increase understanding of human evolution.

“Through his pioneering research, P??bo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans,” said the Nobel Assembly on Monday, adding that he had also discovered the Denisovans, a previously unknown group in the hominin family that are near-relatives of modern-day humans.

P??bo works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which he founded in 1999. He is only the second solo winner of the SKr10m ($900,000) medicine prize in the past 10 years; it is usually shared by two or three people.