Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction
Neanderthal genomes have been recovered from sites across Eurasia, painting an increasingly complex picture of their populations' structure, mostly indicating 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 ~100 ka with other late Neanderthals. Thorin belonged to a population with small group size that showed no genetic introgression with other known late European Neanderthals, revealing some 50 ka genetic isolation of his lineage despite them living in neighboring regions. These results have important implications for resolving competing hypotheses about causes of the Neanderthals' disappearance.