[17][18] He was born through an extramarital affair[19] of his father, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström (1916–2004),[5] who, like his son, became a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (in 1982).

[23] In 1975, Pääbo began studying at Uppsala University, serving one year in the Swedish Defense Forces attached to the School of Interpreters.

[27][28] In 1990, he returned to Europe to become professor of general biology at the University of Munich, and, in 1997, he became founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

[28] In 1997, Pääbo and colleagues reported their successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), originating from a specimen found in Feldhofer grotto in the Neander valley.

[32] In February 2009, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, it was announced that the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had completed the first draft version of the Neanderthal genome.

[35] Pääbo first wanted to classify the Denisovans as a species of their own, separate from modern humans and Neanderthals but changed his mind after peer-review.

[36][37] Pääbo's doctoral student Viviane Slon was able to successfully map the Denisovan genome, clarifying geographic distribution and admixtures in archaic humans.

[45] The findings were described in a Nature article with Hugo Zeberg from Karolinska Institutet and Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute.

[48] In October 2009, the Foundation For the Future announced that Pääbo had been awarded the 2009 Kistler Prize for his work isolating and sequencing ancient DNA, beginning in 1984 with a 2,400-year-old mummy.

[49] In June 2010, the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) awarded him the Theodor Bücher Medal for outstanding achievements in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.