Scientists Sequenced the DNA of the ‘Last Neanderthal’—and It Alters Human History

3 min read

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.

As the years went on, more and more remains of this Neanderthal were discovered. “I began to find {remnants of the Neanderthal’s jaw} in 2015,” Slimak told the New Statesman in 2022, “but each year we find one tooth, or one fragment of bone.” Slimak determined that this particular Neanderthal lived 42,000 years ago, towards the end of that species’ time on this planet.

As such, he named the Neanderthal Thorin after the Tolkien character. “Thorin in the Hobbit is one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain and the last of its lineage,” Slimak told the website IFLScience. “Thorin the Neanderthal is also an end of lineage. An end of a way to be human.”

To confirm his suspicions about Thorin’s age and attempt to glean more information about not just when but how this particular specimen lived, Slimak and his colleagues had Thorin’s genome analyzed. The results, published in the journal Cell Genomics, show that Thorin’s lineage managed to stay isolated from the rest of the Neanderthal population, “in spite of the fact that other groups lived nearby.”

Nearly a decade before ever finding Thorin, Slimak had already theorized that any Neanderthals who had resided in the Rhône Valley would have been different from those in the surrounding areas. His assessment, at that point, was based on the stone tools found at various sites, noting that those in the Rhône Valley didn’t reflect the newer tool-making style found at other locations.

“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.”

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