Philippa Kaur

Ludovic Slimak helped uncover the remains of Thorin, a NeanderthalLaure Metz
The Last NeanderthalLudovic Slimak (translated by Andrew Brown) (Polity Press (UK, 26 September; US, 24 November))
A Neanderthal skeleton spotted by chance under some leaves, calcified soot and a trove of remarkably tiny arrowheads. These assorted finds from Grotte Mandrin in France have not only transformed our understanding of Neanderthals, but also of the first waves of our species, Homo sapiens, to have reached Europe.
Even more remarkably, the cave has revealed secrets about when the two groups first encountered each other, and why one species subsequently thrived, while the other went extinct. That is the question tackled in The Last Neanderthal: Understanding how humans die, a new book by palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse, France, who led the excavations at Grotte Mandrin.
Central to this story is Thorin, a Neanderthal fossil discovered in 2015 just outside the cave entrance, when the sweep of a brush revealed five of his teeth, visible on the soil surface. To preserve every bit of information from this rare find, the bones were painstakingly excavated using tweezers to remove one grain of sand at a time. It took seven years just to recover the remains of his skull and left hand.
The discovery opened up a mystery that took years to solve: different dating techniques produced wildly conflicting results about when Thorin had lived. Eventually, it was confirmed that the fossil was between 42,000 and 50,000 years old, making Thorin one of the last Neanderthals (the species died out entirely around 40,000 years ago). Remarkably, his genome could be sequenced, revealing he was part of a previously unknown lineage that diverged from the main Neanderthal population at least 50,000 years earlier, then existed in extreme isolation.
The Last Neanderthal is a deeply personal and philosophical book that conjures a vivid sense of what it is like to investigate Thorin’s existence and that of the different groups that occupied the cave over millennia. The distinctive smell at Grotte Mandrin, Slimak realises, is from the soot of ancient fires preserved in calcite layers on the walls, forming a black-and-white “bar code”. The bar code can be precisely dated, so bits that have fallen to the floor provide dates for different occupations, revealing that H. sapiens occupied the cave just six months after Neanderthals left. The book conveys Slimak’s astonishment at discovering Thorin hiding in plain sight. “You don’t find a Neanderthal body by taking a stroll through the forest, just like that, lying on the side of the path,” he writes. “It’s crazy.”
The jaw of Thorin, a Neanderthal fossil discovered in 2015Xavier Muth
Which brings us to the question of why the Neanderthals died out. This is much debated, with the finger typically pointed at extermination by the incoming H. sapiens, or climatic upheaval resulting from a volcanic eruption or a flipping of Earth’s magnetic field. But Slimak has a different view, drawing on evidence found at Grotte Mandrin, in particular a layer of tiny, triangular stone points that were probably used as arrowheads by one of the first waves of H. sapiens to reach the region about 55,000 years ago.
These points are almost identical to artefacts made by H. sapiens in roughly the same time period at a site called Ksar Akil in Lebanon, nearly 4000 kilometres away. This indicates that these people were remarkably efficient at preserving and standardising their traditions across vastly distant social networks, leading Slimak to conclude that they had far more efficient “ways of being in the world” than Neanderthals, who lived in small, isolated groups without such standardisation.
We might like to imagine a dramatic face-off between H. sapiens and Neanderthals, but the reality was totally different, he writes. Drawing on accounts of the collapses of numerous Indigenous groups in Africa, Australia and the Americas after colonisation, Slimak argues that Neanderthal groups slowly fell apart when confronted with others who had a much more efficient way of existing. “It is in the collapse of their views on the reality of the world that humans die… not with a bang but a whimper,” he writes.

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The bones were painstakingly excavated using tweezers to remove a grain of sand at a time
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It is a desperately sad eventuality to contemplate, yet immersing yourself in the world of these lost people in The Last Neanderthal is a rare treat.

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A collection of stone tools at the Milovice IV archaeological siteMartin Novák
A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago. The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.
In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site, called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.

The tools showed signs of significant use, says Chlachula. Most of the blades were worn down from cutting and scraping bones, wood and hides, and some bore marks of having been attached to a handle. Some of the points had fractures or microscopic traces of impact, and one had apparently been used as the tip of a spear or arrow.
Several of the pieces had been recycled from older, different tools, suggesting good stone was scarce or that the hunter was mindful of not wasting resources, he says.
Further analyses revealed that about two-thirds of the tools had been crafted from glacial deposit flint stones found at least 130 kilometres northward – and significantly farther if using winding footpaths to reach them. Most of the others appeared to come from western Slovakia, about 100 kilometres south-east. Whether the owner acquired the stones directly from deposits  or through a trade network remains unknown, says Chlachula.

Many pieces were too worn or broken to be used as is, he explains. But it is possible the hunter kept them in the hope of recycling them — or even for their sentimental value.

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Left: The remains of a middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China, who was smoke-dried prior to burial about 8000 years ago. Right: A modern smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people in West Papua, IndonesiaZhen Li, Hirofumi Matsumura, Hsiao-chun Hung
Human bodies carefully preserved by smoking up to 14,000 years ago have been found at archaeological sites in South-East Asia, making them the oldest known mummies in the world.
A similar practice continues today among the Dani people in West Papua, Indonesia. The Dani mummify their deceased relatives by exposing the bodies to smoke, then keep and revere them as part of the household. Many of their mummies are tightly bound in crouching poses.
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Similar “hyper-flexed” ancient human remains have also been found in Australia, China, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.
Hsiao-chun Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, says that while she was working on ancient skeletons in Vietnam in 2017, she was struck by the similarity of the burial remains they were excavating to the Dani’s tradition.
Hung and her colleagues studied 54 hunter-gatherer burials from 11 archaeological sites located across South-East Asia, dating from 12,000 to 4000 years ago, to look for evidence of the skeletons having been slowly smoked. Most of the sites were in northern Vietnam and southern China.

Many of the remains showed clear signs of being partially burned, but not enough to have been cremated. The researchers then applied two analytical techniques – X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy – to dozens of bone samples to reveal whether they were exposed to heat and how much.
Over 90 per cent of the 69 skeletal samples showed evidence of having been heated. The results showed that the human remains hadn’t been exposed to high heat but rather to low temperatures, indicating they had been smoked for possibly weeks or even months.
The oldest mummy tested by the team, from Hang Cho, Vietnam, was over 11,000 years old. But similarly singed, tightly bound skeletons were also found at another site in Hang Muoi, Vietnam, dated to over 14,000 years ago. “We did not test this one by X-ray or infrared because it was obviously partly burnt, and could be observed with the naked eye,” Hung says.
Until now, the oldest known mummified humans were from northern Chile, around 7000 years ago, and Ancient Egypt, from 4500 years ago.
Hung says all the evidence points to the likelihood that this type of burial practice was widespread across southern China and South-East Asia, stretching back at least 14,000 years or even earlier, and continuing until about 4000 to 3500 years ago, when farming populations became dominant in the region. The hyper-flexed bindings of the mummified bodies might have made them easier to transport, she says.

Ethnographic records indicate that the tradition persisted in southern Australia into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Hung. “And our own ethnoarchaeological studies in the New Guinea Highlands reveal that, in some communities, this practice still continues today.”
“The results show that a unique combination of technique, tradition, culture, and above all, a deep belief and enduring love for the ancestors has persisted for an astonishing length of time and spread across a vast region, from the Palaeolithic era to the present,” she says.
Vito Hernandez at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, says the study challenges long-standing assumptions that early mummification practices arose only in arid areas like Atacama in South America or the Nile valley. “It emphasises the role tropical environments have played in fostering distinct mortuary traditions amongst early modern humans to have spread to the Far East and, potentially, the Pacific,” he says.
“By extending the timeline of mummification by at least 5000 years before Chinchorro culture [of South America], they highlight South-East Asia as an independent centre of cultural innovation and underscore the deep cultural continuities linking early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the region with present-day Indigenous groups in New Guinea and Australia,” says Hernandez.

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Ibex can move nimbly across steep mountain slopesSerge Goujon/Shutterstock
Nearly 300,000 years ago, Neanderthals had already figured out how to hunt mountain goats along vertical cliffs and process them in well-organised camps.
Known for ambushing large animals in Western Europe’s flat meadows and forests, it seems Neanderthals adapted to the hills of Eastern Europe by adding nimble ibex to their hunting regime. The early humans skinned and butchered the animals in a nearby cave before roasting their bones for marrow and grease, showing impressive skill and knowledge far earlier than expected, says Stefan Milošević at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

“The approach of hunting ibex is completely different, because it lives on a very rugged and steep, barren terrain,” he says. “We now see that early Neanderthals – who had barely differentiated themselves anthropologically as a species – were already exploiting ecological niches that no hominin had ever exploited before.”
Neanderthals evolved about 400,000 years ago, but most of what we know about them comes from sites in Western Europe that are younger than 150,000 years. So finding clues that fill in gaps in the Neanderthal timeline, habitat and culture is critical, says Marie-Hélène Moncel at France’s National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who wasn’t involved in the study.
In 2017, archaeologists found Neanderthal remains in an approximately 290,000-year-old layer of the Velika Balanica cave in Serbia, making them the oldest such remains found in Eastern Europe.

Since then, Milošević and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of stone tools and sifted through about 30,000 animal bone fragments in the cave. Nearly three-quarters of the fragments are slivers less than 2 centimetres long, and most of the identifiable ones are from ibex and red deer killed in spring and summer, suggesting the Neanderthals were seasonal cave dwellers.
Some bones – especially long deer legs – were burned and cracked open, meaning these early Neanderthals were probably heating bones to liquefy the marrow for easier extraction and leaving leftover fragments in the hearth so that bone grease would keep the fire burning. Others showed signs of tendon harvesting, possibly for rope or nets.
Deer skeletons represented older youngsters and adults, a sign of selective hunting that promotes herd survival, says Milošević. But the ibex were killed at all life stages – suggesting the Neanderthals were still “rookies” up against mountain goats, probably hunting with sharpened sticks and rudimentary traps. “They most likely had a lot of unsuccessful attempts,” he says.
In addition to these preferred food sources, the researchers also found a few processed remains from wild boar, cave bears, wolves, foxes, leopards and various birds.

The organised positions of the bones in different sections of the cave point to distinct zones for specialised tasks. The hearth was in the centre, for example, with discarded bones piled up behind it, and the entrance appeared to be used as a tool workshop.
Overall, the findings point to “remarkable cognitive flexibility,” says José Carrión at the University of Murcia in Spain. “It’s a confirmation that Neanderthals were creative problem-solvers, managing complex habitats with ingenuity and skill. Neanderthals were humans – intelligent, social, and extraordinarily adaptive.”
“What emerges from Balanica is the picture of Neanderthals who were not only resilient but already experimenting with strategies and social organisation that we tend to associate with much later periods,” says Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo at the Archaeological Institute of Mérida in Spain. “It reminds us that Neanderthal sophistication was not a late spark, but a deep-rooted flame that ignited surprisingly early in human history.”

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic sites of southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier, with New Scientist’s Kate Douglas.

Find out more

Topics:Neanderthals More