And as We Moved, We Embraced, and We Absorbed: A Narrative and Contextualization of the Work of Svante Pääbo, Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine 2022.

A few months after its publication, my friend Naoyuki Takahata presented me with a copy of the book he had written with Jan Klein. The cover of the book was most unusual. It was the reproduction of a portion of the painting of Paul Gauguin's masterpiece, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, "D'oú Venons-Nous? Que Sommes-Nous? Où Allons-Nous?" ("Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"), painted in Tahiti in 1897, six years before his tragic death. Gauguin's painting (which, interestingly, has to be viewed from right to left) depicts the spectrum of human activity from birth to death. Klein and Takahata titled their book Where Do We Come From? The Molecular Evidence for Human Descent, which I reviewed in Current Science (10 September 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]