Let us allow the author of this article to evoke a memory right away. September 2018. It was in Malataverne, a commune in the Drôme, in the Mandrin cave. A report to evoke the quest for the last Neanderthals in France that a team led by the archaeologist Ludovic Slimak, a researcher at the CNRS, had been conducting there every summer for years. And at the entrance to the cave, like an apparition: crushed and still trapped in the gray ground, a mandible full of teeth. A few phalanges next to it and, a little further away, other teeth. The skull was missing but, without a doubt, we were there in front of the most beautiful Neanderthal specimen discovered in France since the end of the 1970s. A wonderful scoop.
However, science and its popularization are such that we do not mention a discovery until its in-depth study is published in a serious journal. To avoid compromising the researcher’s work or the trust he has placed in you, but also to ensure that the announced discovery does not fizzle out. It was therefore necessary to promise not to reveal anything, to sit on the scoop and bite one’s lip. Six years later, almost to the day, the study finally appears in Cell Genomics, this Wednesday, September 11.
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The individual was nicknamed “Thorin”, like the character in the novel. Bilbo the Hobbit. “It’s a tribute to Tolkien, who described intelligent humanoids belonging to different speciesexplains Ludovic Slimak, first author of the study. Tolkien’s Thorin is one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain, one of the last of his line, and our Thorin is one of the last Neanderthals.”
“Grain-to-grain extraction”
If the study took so long to be published, it is due to two main reasons. First of all, the slowness of the extraction of Thorin’s remains, actually unearthed in 2015! “I had decided to extend the excavation outside the cave, says Ludovic Slimak. It was during the cleaning of the area that we saw it.” Under the first brushstroke, five connected teeth appeared. “No one tears off a fragment of their jaw, said the researcher. Of course, there was a body. But on the ground, everything is fragile. How do you get this thing out, which is made up of thousands of little pieces, while preserving its precise position? Answer : “We stop everything, we sit down and we think. We had to develop a grain-by-grain extraction protocol. And when I say that, it’s not an image, it’s grain-by-grain with tweezers.”
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