At Grotte Mandrin in France, a Neanderthal discovery has challenged everything we know about our human relatives. We travelled to the cave to meet palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak, who discovered Thorin, one of the last known Neanderthals, reshaping our understanding of human history.
From the remarkable preservation of remains to the groundbreaking DNA evidence there, Slimak explores how an isolated Neanderthal population survived for tens of thousands of years, even interacting with early Homo sapiens, before disappearing. Thorin’s story challenges assumptions about intelligence, identity and survival, offering a new perspective on what it means to be human.