The Latest Breaking News from Thorin

This year, we learned that our Neanderthal cousins were a lot like us, despite treading their own path that ended in extinction.

Lucy may be the best-known prehuman fossil in the world. But other famous fossils have given us important insight into our evolutionary history.

Thorin — nicknamed after a dwarf in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" — is also called the "last Neanderthal" because he may have lived as recently as 42,000 years ago.

The prevailing narrative of how humanity came about seemed straightforward enough: in Europe, the last Neanderthals bowed out as Homo sapiens began arriving on the continent around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. Neanderthals were thought to be part of a single, genetically homogeneous population, spread across Spain, France, Croatia, Belgium,…

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