04/05/2026
Around 65,000 years ago, something catastrophic quietly swept through the Neanderthal world. Across the vast forests, grasslands, and river valleys of Ice Age Europe, genetically diverse Neanderthal populations vanished one by one, leaving behind only a single surviving lineage clinging to existence in what is now southwestern France. A landmark study published in Nature Communications, led by Professor Cosimo Posth at the University of TĂĽbingen, has now reconstructed this forgotten catastrophe using the largest ancient Neanderthal genetic dataset ever assembled.
The team sequenced mitochondrial DNA from ten newly analysed Neanderthal individuals from six sites across Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, combining their results with 49 previously published Neanderthal genomes. The picture that emerged was stark and haunting. Before 65,000 years ago, multiple genetically distinct Neanderthal populations lived across Europe. After that date, every single one of those lineages disappears from the fossil and genetic record. Only one group survived, and every Late Neanderthal on the continent descended from them alone.
The consequences of that catastrophic bottleneck compounded relentlessly over the following tens of thousands of years. Because every surviving Neanderthal shared the same small ancestral gene pool, genetic diversity across the entire species collapsed to almost nothing. Neanderthals from Spain and Neanderthals from the Caucasus Mountains, despite being separated by thousands of kilometres, were genetically almost identical to one another. But they were simultaneously more different from Neanderthals elsewhere in Asia than the most genetically distant modern human populations alive today are from each other, evidence of just how deeply isolated different regional groups had become.
Then, between 45,000 and 42,000 years ago, as our own ancestors spread westward across Europe, Neanderthal numbers fell off a cliff for the fi
