Bitcoin News
By Bruce Buterin
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Thorin's Genome and What It Actually Shows. The tooth came from Grotte Mandrin, a site in the Rhône Valley that's been a goldmine for…
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Why This Breaks the Old Story. The dominant narrative for years was pretty straightforward: Neanderthals faded out because they…
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What Grotte Mandrin Keeps Turning Up. The site itself has been occupied intermittently for roughly 80,000 years.
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A 42,000-year-old tooth changed everything. Researchers at the University of Toulouse sequenced DNA from a Neanderthal found at Grotte Mandrin in France's Rhône Valley, and what…
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The tooth came from Grotte Mandrin, a site in the Rhône Valley that's been a goldmine for archaeologists studying ancient human activity.
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What the genome showed was isolation. Deep, sustained isolation. Thorin's group had been genetically separate from nearby Neanderthal populations for approximately 50,000 years.
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Slimak's work at the University of Toulouse has long pushed toward combining hard archaeological evidence with genetic analysis, and Thorin's case is probably the clearest…
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The dominant narrative for years was pretty straightforward: Neanderthals faded out because they got absorbed into expanding modern human populations.
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Thorin's group didn't mix. They were geographically close to other populations — both Neanderthal and early modern human — but closeness didn't mean contact, at least not genetic…
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Read also: Solana Surges Past Resistance as 260,000 Daily Token Launches Signal $147 Target
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The isolation Thorin's group maintained raises uncomfortable questions about how extinction actually worked for Neanderthals.
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Researchers aren't done. Ongoing excavations continue to pull artifacts and bone fragments from the site, and each one adds detail to a picture that's still being assembled.
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The implications stretch beyond Neanderthals specifically. If small, genetically closed groups could persist undetected within a broader landscape of populations — maintaining…
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More context: Bitwise Closes $722,000 Dogecoin ETF BWOW After Lackluster Demand
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Small populations cut off from outside genetic input can survive for a long time. But they're also fragile.
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