Scientists Sequenced the DNA of the ‘Last Neanderthal’—and It Alters Human History
Discover new clues about how our ancient relatives disappeared from time.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
In 2015, a paleoanthropology team discovered jaw remains of a roughly 42,000-year-old Neanderthal in France.
Over the next several years, the team, led by Ludovic Slimak, found more of the Neanderthal’s remains and began to analyze its genome.
Despite its proximity to other groups of Neanderthals and the era’s modern humans, the lineage of the specimen, dubbed “Thorin,” found by Slimak managed to stay totally isolated from groups of other early beings.
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something,” says Thorin Oakenshield in J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy novel The Hobbit. “You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
For example, in 2015, paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak made a remarkable discovery at Grotte Mandrin, a cave in Rhône Valley, France. He and his team had been working the area since 1998 to find remnants of humanity’s prehistoric forbearers, and after 17 years, they certainly found something: a piece of a jaw belonging to a Neanderthal.
“It turns out that what I proposed 20 years ago was predictive,” Slimak told the publication Live Science. “The population of Thorin had spent 50 millennia without exchanging a single gene with the classical Neanderthal populations.” The analysis showed that Thorin had “high genetic homozygosity,” which indicates inbreeding in the lineage’s recent past. It also offers no evidence of interbreeding with modern humans of the time.
“Everything must be rewritten about the greatest extinction in humanity and our understanding of this incredible process that will lead Homo sapiens to remain the only survival of humanity,” Slimak said in assessing what this discovery means. “How can we imagine populations that lived for 50 millennia in isolation while they are only two weeks’ walk from each other? All processes need to be rethought.”
The genome from the Neanderthal specimen found at Grotte Mandrin in France, dated to roughly 42,000 years ago, shows high genetic homozygosity and little to no evidence of gene flow with nearby Neanderthal populations or early modern humans, which points to a lineage that remained isolated for tens of thousands of years despite geographic proximity. That kind of isolation challenges the assumption that nearby groups would naturally intermingle and instead suggests barriers that prevented gene exchange over extended periods, whether ecological, behavioral, or social. The result does not rewrite human history on its own, but it does force a closer look at how populations actually interacted in deep prehistory, because proximity alone clearly did not guarantee connection, and in this case, a long-separated lineage persisted right alongside others without blending into them.