{"id":107308,"date":"2025-08-24T20:30:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T20:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/107308\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T20:30:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T20:30:19","slug":"scientists-sequenced-the-dna-of-the-last-neanderthal-and-it-alters-human-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/107308\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Sequenced the DNA of the \u2018Last Neanderthal\u2019\u2014and It Alters Human History"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story:<\/p>\n

In 2015, a paleoanthropology team discovered jaw remains of a roughly 42,000-year-old Neanderthal in France.<\/p>\n

Over the next several years, the team, led by Ludovic Slimak, found more of the Neanderthal\u2019s remains and began to analyze its genome.<\/p>\n

Despite its proximity to other groups of Neanderthals and the era\u2019s modern humans, the lineage of the specimen, dubbed \u201cThorin,\u201d found by Slimak managed to stay totally isolated from groups of other early beings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nothing like looking, if you want to find something,\u201d says Thorin Oakenshield in J.R.R. Tolkien<\/a>\u2019s beloved fantasy novel The Hobbit<\/a>. \u201cYou certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, in 2015, paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak made a remarkable discovery at Grotte Mandrin, a cave in Rh\u00f4ne Valley, France. He and his team had been working the area since 1998 to find remnants of humanity\u2019s prehistoric forbearers<\/a>, and after 17 years, they certainly found something: a piece of a jaw belonging to a Neanderthal.<\/p>\n

As the years went on, more and more remains of this Neanderthal were discovered. \u201cI began to find {remnants of the Neanderthal’s jaw} in 2015,\u201d Slimak told the New Statesman<\/a> in 2022, \u201cbut each year we find one tooth, or one fragment of bone.\u201d Slimak determined that this particular Neanderthal lived 42,000 years ago, towards the end of that species\u2019 time on this planet.<\/p>\n

As such, he named the Neanderthal Thorin after the Tolkien character. \u201cThorin in the Hobbit is one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain and the last of its lineage,\u201d Slimak told the website IFLScience<\/a>. \u201cThorin the Neanderthal is also an end of lineage. An end of a way to be human.\u201d<\/p>\n

To confirm his suspicions about Thorin\u2019s age and attempt to glean more information about not just when but how this particular specimen lived, Slimak and his colleagues had Thorin\u2019s genome analyzed<\/a>. The results, published in the journal Cell Genomics<\/a>, show that Thorin\u2019s lineage managed to stay isolated from the rest of the Neanderthal population, \u201cin spite of the fact that other groups lived nearby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly a decade before ever finding Thorin, Slimak had already theorized that any Neanderthals who had resided in the Rh\u00f4ne 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 Rh\u00f4ne Valley didn\u2019t reflect the newer tool-making style found at other locations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out that what I proposed 20 years ago was predictive,\u201d Slimak told the publication Live Science<\/a>. \u201cThe population of Thorin had spent 50 millennia without exchanging a single gene with the classical Neanderthal populations.\u201d The analysis showed that Thorin had \u201chigh genetic homozygosity,\u201d which indicates inbreeding in the lineage\u2019s recent past. It also offers no evidence of interbreeding with modern humans<\/a> of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything 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,\u201d Slimak said in assessing what this discovery means. \u201cHow can we imagine populations that lived for 50 millennia in isolation while they are only two weeks\u2019 walk from each other? All processes need to be rethought.\u201d<\/p>\n

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