A convincing book on the end of Neanderthals is a rare treat

The last Neanderthal
Ludovic Slimak (translated by Andrew Brown) (Polity Press (UK, September 26; United States, November 24)))))

A Neanderthal skeleton spotted by chance under certain leaves, calcified soot and a range of remarkably tiny arrows. These discoveries accompanied by Mandrin cave in France not only transformed our understanding of Neanderthals, but also of the first waves of our species, Homo sapiensfor having reached Europe.

Even more remarkable, the cave revealed secrets at the moment when the two groups met for the first time, and why a species then prospered, while the other died. This is the question addressed in The last Neanderthal: understand how humans dieA new book by Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse, in France, which led the excavations with a mandrel cave.

At the heart of this story is Thorin, a Neanderthal fossil discovered in 2015 just outside the entrance to the cave, when the scanning of a brush revealed five of its teeth, visible on the surface of the ground. To preserve all the information from this rare discovery, the bones were meticulously searched using tweezers to eliminate a grain of sand at a time. It took seven years just to recover the remains of his skull and his left hand.

The discovery opened a mystery that has taken years to solve: different dating techniques have produced extremely contradictory results on the moment Thorin had lived. Finally, it was confirmed that the fossil was between 42,000 and 50,000 years old, making Thorin one of the last Neanderthals (the species completely died around 40,000 years ago). Remarkably, his genome could be sequenced, revealing that he was part of a previously unknown line which diverged from the main Neanderthal population at least 50,000 years earlier, then existed in extreme insulation.

The last Neanderthal is a deeply personal and philosophical book which evokes a lively meaning of what it is to study the existence of Thorin and that of the different groups which occupied the cave during the millennia. The distinctive smell of a mandrel cave, realizes Slimak, comes from the soot of the old fires kept in layers of calcite on the walls, forming a black and white “barcode”. The barcode can be precisely dated, so the bits that fell on the ground provide dates for different professions, revealing that H. Sapiens Occupied the cave six months after the departure of the Neanderthals. The book transmits Slimak’s astonishment to discover Thorin hiding at sight. “You do not find a Neanderthal body while walking in the forest, just like that, lying on the side of the path,” he wrote. “It’s crazy.”

Which brings us to the question of why the Neanderthals have disappeared. This is very debated, the finger is generally pointed out of the new extermination H. Sapiensor climate upheaval resulting from a volcanic eruption or a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. But Slimak has a different vision, relying on evidence found with a mandrel cave, in particular a layer of tiny triangular stone points which were probably used as arrow tips by one of the first waves of H. Sapiens To reach the region about 55,000 years ago.

These points are almost identical to the artifacts produced by H. Sapiens During the same period on a site called Ksar Akil in Lebanon, nearly 4,000 kilometers. This indicates that these people were remarkably effective in preserving and standardizing their traditions on largely distant social networks, which led Slimak to conclude that they had “ways of being much more effective in the world” than Neanderthals, who lived in small isolated groups without standardization.

We may like to imagine a dramatic confrontation between H. Sapiens And the Neanderthals, but the reality was totally different, he writes. Based on the accounts of the collapses of many indigenous groups in Africa, Australia and the Americas after colonization, Slimak maintains that Neanderthal groups have slowly collapsed when confronted with others who had a much more effective way of existing. “It is in the collapse of their opinions on the reality of the world that humans die … not with a blow but a groan,” he wrote.

It is a desperately sad possibility to contemplate, but to immerse yourself in the world of these lost people The last Neanderthal is a rare treat.