“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew his genome, Horatio. A genome of infinite base pairs, of most excellent bone collagen preservation.”

Svante Paabo, face to face with a neanderthal skull. Paabo initially sequenced 4 million base pairs of the neanderthal genome in 2010. In 2013, a full genome was sequenced from the toe bone of a Siberian neanderthal in the Altai Mountains.