Ludovic Slimak has spent decades in the caves once inhabited by Neanderthals, uncovering their worlds. In the process, he has transformed what we know about the very last Neanderthals to have existed, thanks to remarkable discoveries at a small cave in France called Grotte Mandrin. Located next to the mighty Rhône river – once a major migratory route for bison, horses and deer – the cave was inhabited by different groups of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens over a period of 80,000 years as they followed various animal herds.
This makes Grotte Mandrin a time capsule of this lost society. It is littered with so many flint tools and fossilised bones that visitors must walk barefoot to minimise damage to the prehistoric treasures buried in the sediment, awaiting discovery by the ongoing excavations. Central to Slimak’s ideas about the last Neanderthals is a 42,000-year-old skeleton he found by chance outside the cave entrance.
Incredibly, one of its teeth still contained the individual’s DNA, allowing its genome to be sequenced from a chip, an analysis that reveals startling new clues about the species’ extinction. New Scientist met Slimak, who is based at the University of Toulouse in France, at Grotte Mandrin to find out his thoughts about whether Neanderthals really were so different from us – and to smell the odours of prehistoric BBQs still trapped on the rock from the cave walls. (This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can watch the video below.) Alison George: Why is Grotte Mandrin so special?
Ludovic Slimak: It’s a tiny cave, but you have a record of the fossilisation of something unique – the very last moments of the Neanderthal population. There’s a very rich record here of human occupation at the site. From 110,000 years ago, Neanderthals came regularly into the cave, and we also have two phases of early Homo sapiens, one at 54,000 years ago and one at 42,000 years ago.
At certain moments, both Neanderthals and H. sapiens shared the territory, and they could have even shared the cave. You have a kind of sandwich of occupation between two very distinct humanities, and this is unique in Europe. The end of the archaeological record here, 42,000 years ago, is a pretty exciting period, because it’s when you have the very last Neanderthals, and you have an important migration of H. sapiens across all of continental Europe.
You’ve referred to the cave as a prehistoric Pompeii. What are the similarities? Here in the Rhône valley, there is a strong wind coming from the north, called the mistral, which takes sand and silt from the Rhône river and deposits it in the cave, so it’s like Pompeii, but with no catastrophic events.
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