Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has long cherished a dream that seemed impossible: to isolate DNA from Egyptian mummies and thus “get to know” people who lived thousands of years ago. His youthful obsession led him along a thorny path - through a painful scientific search, the struggle for the purity of experiments and intellectual honesty, diplomatic maneuvers and bureaucratic wars... And it led him much further into the depths of centuries, to the reading of the Neanderthal genome, which radically changed all ideas about the Neanderthals themselves and about their interaction with the ancestors of modern humanity. “Neanderthal” is not only a fascinating story about a sensational breakthrough, but also a document that records an important milestone in the history of science: the emergence of paleogenomics, a new discipline that allows, by studying ancient DNA, to reconstruct the picture of the evolution of our species in such detail , which we never dared to dream of before.