Published Summary: Neanderthal genomes have been recovered from sites across Eurasia, painting an increasingly complex picture of their populations’ structure that mostly indicates that late European Neanderthals belonged to a single metapopulation with no significant evidence of population structure. Here, we report the discovery of a late Neanderthal individual, nicknamed “Thorin,” from Grotte Mandrin in Mediterranean France, and his genome. These dentognathic fossils, including a rare example of distomolars, are associated with a rich archeological record of Neanderthal final technological traditions in this region ∼50–42 thousand years ago. Thorin’s genome reveals a relatively early divergence of ∼105 ka with other late Neanderthals. Thorin belonged to a population with a small group size that showed no genetic introgression with other known late European Neanderthals, revealing some 50 ka of genetic isolation of his lineage despite them living in neighboring regions. These results have important implications for resolving competing hypotheses about causes of the disappearance of the Neanderthals.
We’re painting with a very wide brush when we say neanderthal—the article I shared was about a distinct neanderthal genetic group that seems to have been isolated from other neanderthal groups for a long while with no contact (or at least no genetic mixing).
I kinda take issue with Live Science’s use of “extinct” in that article—from what I can tell from the research article the main takeaways are that neanderthals had 2-3% dna which was causing us to over-estimate their population size, and relatedly that rather than a population collapse, their extinction was due to slowly merging with another species (very cool btw). Along with other pre-hominids they are indeed extinct though.