The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute announced on Monday.

The prize, arguably among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357). It is the first of this year's batch of prizes.

Pääbo got the prize "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution," the assembly said on the prize's official website.

"He was overwhelmed, he was speechless. Very happy," said Thomas Perlmann, secretary for the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, who called Pääbo with the news.

"He asked if he could tell anyone and asked if he could tell his wife and I said that was okay. He was incredibly thrilled about this award."

Pääbo, son of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergstrom, has been credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to allow for the examination of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.

To find the origin of humans – or Homo sapiens in scientific terms – Pääbo "accomplished something seemingly impossible," which is to sequence the genome of the already-extinct Neanderthal, a close relative of humanity, said the assembly.

More importantly, he found that we modern humans inherited some of the genes from the Neanderthal, an event that took place about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors migrated out of Africa.

He also uncovered the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old fragment of a finger bone discovered in Siberia.

"A scientist who helps us to better understand our own species - and is rightly recognized for it today," German education and research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger tweeted on Monday.

Pääbo's research led to the creation of a new scientific field called "paleogenomics," and "provided the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human," according to the assembly.

Born in 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden, Pääbo now works as head of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Pääbo's most cited paper in the Web of Science was published in 1989, with 4,077 citations, said David Pendlebury, from UK-based scientific data analytics provider Clarivate.

"Only some 2,000 papers out of 55,000,000 published since 1970 have been cited this many times," he said.

CGTN's Liu Yuyao contributed to the story.

(With input from Reuters)