A fossilised Neanderthal, found in France and nicknamed ‘Thorin’, is from an ancient and previously undescribed genetic line that separated from other Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago and remained isolated for more than 50,000 years, right up until our ancient cousins went extinct.

>Thorin’s community had been isolated from other Neanderthals for at least 50,000 years, despite living just a 10-day walk from another Neanderthal community

That is fascinating. It’s increasingly clear how “human” Neanderthals were, but this behavior is decidedly not human. Put two camps of sapiens 10 days apart, within a few years we’re doing holiday celebrations and making kids. Here you have two groups separated for 50k years because they dared not engage with another group. It’s always tempting to extrapolate too much, but you have to wonder, did Neanderthals fear one another? What did those family units look like? One deduction is that leaving your birth group was so dangerous you wouldn’t ever cross that line. Conversely, sapiens and even chimps regularly leave their birth groups, if not for culture than by instinct to avoid inbreeding.

Extrapolate a bit more, we know there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and denisovians and sapiens (and maybe even erectus). Maybe those were the only groups that were safe to approach? Or maybe denisovians and sapiens were somewhat more “forceful” with Neanderthals? Maybe they were a fearful animal with good reason. Idk. Cool stuff.

>Thorin is the most complete Neanderthal individual found in France since 1979 …

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>… The genome of Thorin sheds new light on the population structure of late Neanderthals, as our genomic analyses demonstrate that Thorin belongs to a lineage diverging ∼100–105 ka from the ancestral European Neanderthal lineage, and thereby represents a remnant of earlier European Neanderthals. Interestingly, the timing of divergence of this lineage coincides with the MIS 5 interglacial, a period in which fast climatic and environmental changes across Eurasia and repopulation by warm adapted fauna occurred throughout the continent. The timing of this divergence also coincided with a period of population replacement detected in northern Spain among Neanderthal populations. …

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>Besides the lineage that is represented by Thorin, our demographic modeling provides indirect evidence of the presence of another previously unsampled diverged European lineage through introgression in the French Neanderthal Les Cottés. Our demographic modeling suggests that this introgressing lineage diverged some time after the Thorin lineage …

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>… Our results nevertheless suggest a minimum of two, but possibly three, distinct Neanderthal lineages present in Europe during the late Neanderthal period. In the absence of any detectable gene flow between Thorin and other Neanderthal lineages after its divergence, we conclude that Thorin represents a lineage that possibly stayed isolated for ∼50 ka. …

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This research added alot to the human tree of evolution.

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>… which seem to have limited or avoided gene exchange not only with early H. sapiens but, more generally, within Neanderthal populations themselves. Anthropologically, these gene exchange processes are never limited to a love affair between two individuals, but systematically correspond to the alliances that human populations consciously decide to build. The absence of gene exchanges, or their non-reciprocity (presence of Neanderthal genes in the first H. sapiens in Europe, with no reciprocity in the last Neanderthals), raises questions about the social structures that governed these Neanderthal populations

Am I understanding it correctly that the H Sapiens genome was, perhaps nonconsensually, populated Neanderthals genes. But no Neanderthals had any H Sapiens genes. I guess the Neanderthals weren’t as attractive.

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>… The intergroup network of these late Neanderthals appears much more constrained than the large social interconnections visible among H. sapiens populations, where trans-Mediterranean cultural correspondences can be drawn during the three earliest phases of their colonization of Europe from ∼55 to 40 ka. These genetic, social, and cultural divergences among these populations may have induced fragilities among long-isolated Neanderthal groups facing sapiens populations structurally organized on large and complex social networks. Much more than an event, the decline of the Neanderthals would then represent a complex process where the history and ethology of these populations may have played a key role in the structure of their remarkable extinctions.

H Sapiens probably had a lot to do with the extinction of the Neanderthals. I guess that’s how the story goes.