Late Neanderthals Descended From Single Survivor Population
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- Cosimo Posth and an international team at the University of Tübingen published the PNAS study, finding that harsh Ice Age conditions around 75,000 years ago caused widespread Neanderthal populations to retreat to a climate refuge in what is now southwestern France.
- The researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from 10 new Neanderthal individuals across Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, combining those with 49 previously published samples—showing almost all Late Neanderthals, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caucasus, shared a single maternal lineage that emerged from the French refuge around 65,000 years ago.
- Statistical modeling detected a sharp population decline between 45,000 and 42,000 years ago, reaching a minimum shortly before Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago—replacing the previous picture of diverse late populations with one of a single homogeneous lineage.
- First author Charoula Fotiadou explained the team relied on mitochondrial DNA because it survives longer and is easier to extract from ancient remains than nuclear DNA, enabling the expanded 59-individual dataset.
- Posth suggested that the Late Neanderthals' low genetic diversity and the subsequent isolation of small groups may have contributed to their disappearance, describing them as "a very homogeneous group."
- The study integrated genetic data with archaeological evidence from the ROAD database, developed by the ROCEEH project at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, the Senckenberg Research Institute, and the University of Tübingen, to reconstruct Neanderthal demographic history in space and time.
Why it matters: The study rewrites the final chapter of Neanderthal prehistory: rather than diverse populations persisting across Europe until 40,000 years ago, a single lineage replaced earlier groups after 65,000 years ago and then collapsed sharply between 45,000 and 42,000 years ago. The researchers' own framing—that low genetic diversity and small-group isolation may have hastened extinction—suggests the bottleneck itself was a direct contributor to the species' disappearance shortly before modern humans arrived.
