The scenario seemed simple and well established. The last Neanderthals bowed out following the arrival of Sapiens in European territories 40 to 45,000 years ago. These last Neanderthals were represented by a single, very homogeneous population that genetics had recognized across Europe, in Spain, France, Croatia, Belgium and Germany. Genetic studies were conclusive; a single population, very homogeneous in its biology, would give way to the new Sapiens arrivals. In a handful of millennia, somewhere between 45 and 42,000, the cohabitation of the two humanities would result in the replacement of this European Neanderthal population.
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By Ludovic Slimak, University of Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier
This Wednesday, September 11, our team at Grotte Mandrin announced in the magazine Cell Genomics a discovery that profoundly reshapes our knowledge of the last Neanderthals. This time it is the discovery of a Neanderthal body. The first in France since 1978. It was in this same cave that in 2022 the oldest Sapiens migration in Europe. And between 2022 and 2023, three international scientific publications from our research team would question our conceptions of this singular moment in the history of humanity, redefining not only the moment of the arrival of these Sapiens populations, but redrawing their technical knowledgeestablishing their origins from the Mediterranean Levant and proposing a profound redefinition of this unique moment in European history.
What if the history of Sapiens populations in Europe had to be completely rethought?
A totally unknown Neanderthal lineage
Our study is not limited to the simple announcement of the remarkable discovery of a Neanderthal body but presents the result of nearly 10 years of research around this body revealing the existence of a totally unknown Neanderthal lineage within the last Neanderthal populations of Europe, profoundly changing our understanding of this humanity at the time of their extinction.
The first teeth were in fact discovered in 2015. They were on the ground at the entrance to the cave, barely covered with a few leaves. A bit like meeting a Neanderthal while walking in the hills… The body belongs to the most recent archaeological occupations of the Grotte Mandrin, dated 42 to 45,000 years ago. These archaeological levels are directly exposed to the current ground at the entrance to the cavity. But these first teeth appear in fragile sand. The slightest brushstroke risks moving the precious remains, preventing us from recognizing their precise position in the ground.
I then decided to remove the body… with tweezers. Grain of sand after grain of sand… The operation would last 9 years. And it is still not finished… The immense effort on the ground will allow us to recover the tiniest remains in their original position. The multiplication of three-dimensional surveys will then allow the team to gradually reconstruct the very precise position of each of the remains in the ground.
Today, 31 teeth have been found, the bones of the mandible, fragments of skull, phalanges and thousands of tiny bones belonging to our Neanderthal nicknamed Thorin, in homage to the writings and thoughts of JRR Tolkien, Thorin being one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain and the last of his line. The Thorin of Mandrin is as for him… One of the last Neanderthals… Why was Thorin’s body lying at the entrance of the cavity? How could it have been preserved for tens of millennia? How did this body reach us? Was it buried?
Dizzying questions
What do you do when you find yourself confronted with a Neanderthal body? Especially when it has been almost half a century since such a discovery took place in France… Much more profoundly, “The Last Neanderthal” exposed the countless questions that arise around the very notion of the extinction of humanity, a notion that is dizzying and that we do not really know how to question. How could we? Did Neanderthals die out like the dinosaurs following a natural upheaval that swept away their entire universe?
Theories about Neanderthals related to climate change, volcanic explosions, cosmic radiation or devastating epidemics have flourished in recent years. But in my opinion, this is not how humans die. To understand this astonishing equation of Sapiens replacing Neanderthals, we must first understand what Neanderthals were. And what Sapiens are. And the nature of the two creatures – in many ways Sapiens is also a remarkable enigma – eludes us profoundly.
Let’s go back to Thorin and the last Neanderthals. The study published in Cell Genomicswhich I co-direct with Tharsika Vimala and Martin Sikora, population geneticists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Andaine Seguin-Orlando, a paleogenomist at the University of Toulouse, reveals the unthinkable: Thorin’s population belongs to a Neanderthal lineage previously unknown among the Neanderthals believed to have populated Europe in their last millennia of existence.
While these Neanderthal populations in Europe show great genetic homogeneity, Thorin’s population has been distinguished from classical Neanderthals for more than 50 millennia. No direct genetic exchange between Thorin’s population and classical European Neanderthals since the 105e millennium and until the extinction of these populations! A profound divergence. Unexpected. The genetic study thus makes it possible to precisely reposition in time this singular story showing this incredible isolation of these populations and the distant moment of their divergence.
And here, in addition, the Sapiens/Neanderthal equation in Europe needs to be rethought in depth. In this astonishing moment when one humanity replaces the other, there are no longer two protagonists but at least three. And perhaps more, Thorin’s genetic analyses revealing the existence of a phantom lineage, another Neanderthal population, still unknown, and which seems to be walking around European territories at the same time.
But how can we imagine processes of isolation between human populations, for 50 millennia, when these populations are located less than two weeks’ walk from each other? Yet this is what Thorin confronts us with. Evolutionary, cultural and social processes that would be unthinkable if we transposed them to the Sapiens populations as they are known to us through cultural anthropology, history and archaeology. Something seems to profoundly distinguish the ways of being in the world of Neanderthals and Sapiens. Something much deeper than simple cultural or territorial questions, sending us head-on back to the Neanderthal enigma and, probably also, our inability to confront ways of being human that are so far removed from us.
At the same time, our study reveals that Thorin has links with another Neanderthal located 1,700 km away on the Rock of Gibraltar. This skull discovered in the middle of the 19th centurye century had revealed in 2019 a bit of his genetics. He was considered an ancient Neanderthal who lived 80 to 100 millennia ago, but we reveal that this Neanderthal from Gibraltar, nicknamed Nana, dated precisely from the same period as Thorin, in the last millennia of existence of these populations.
And now everything has to be rewritten. Rethinking the first Sapiens, their relationships not with Neanderthals but with biologically very differentiated populations which, although appearing culturally particularly diverse, could become extinct without changing anything in their age-old ways of conceiving the world.
The creature would die out, remaining what it always was. Like a human experiment with no future. But then how do men die? The research continues, and the story seems more and more fascinating…
To go further: Ludovic Slimak published in May 2023 “The Last Neanderthal” at Odile Jacob. The book traces step by step the investigation surrounding the discovery of this body.
Ludovic SlimakArchaeologist, thinker and researcher at the CNRS, University of Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.