Winner. Scientist of the Year 2018. Natural Sciences

Viviane Slon

Academic title, degree: Ph.D.
Fields of science: Paleo Genetics
Research interest: Ancient DNA; Human evolution; Paleoanthropology
Institution: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Position: Paleogeneticist, Department of Evolutionary Genetics
Country: Germany

Dr. Slon completed her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She won the 2017 Dan David Prize. She worked at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University on the earliest human fossils outside Africa. She studied the Qafzeh 9 Skull, looking at developmental malocclusions.

In 2018 Dr. Slon was appointed a postdoctoral researcher working on neanderthals at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She develops techniques to remove hominin DNA from sediments. Her doctoral supervisor Svante Pääbo decoded the Denisovan gene. Dr. Slon visited the Denisova Cave during a symposium, where over one thousand bones are excavated a year.

As her first project, Dr. Slon reported the DNA from the tooth of the fourth Denisova individual ever found on earth. She also co-led a team that found Denisovan DNA in excavated dirt as an alternative to finding rare hominin bones.

Dr. Slon identified that a teenage girl born 90,000 years ago had both Neanderthal and Denisovan parents.

For some time researchers have suspected that two ancient human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans, interbred. It wasn’t until paleogeneticist Viviane Slon received the results from a 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested (and five other sample tests from the same “child”) that this was confirmed. In 2018, Dr. Slon and her colleagues published the genome of Denny, a hybrid hominin. DNA was extracted from a hominin bone found in a Middle Pleistocene layer. Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating, the hominin was identified as a girl born more than 50,000 years ago to a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

Slon has published her findings in the scientific journal Nature and it’s groundbreaking as nobody has ever before identified a first-generation hybrid. Denisovas were a “sister group of the Neanderthals, splitting from a common ancestor some 390,000 years ago” and so far pinned only to one area of Siberia. The work was covered in BBC News, National Geographic, EurekAlert!, The Atlantic and Archaeology magazine.