For a long time, the last Neanderthals in Europe were pictured as a genetically diverse bunch, scattered across the continent right up until they disappeared. New DNA evidence tells a very different story. Researchers have found that Neanderthals actually went through a severe population crash around 75,000 years ago, one so extreme that only a single surviving group in what is now southwestern France seems to have repopulated the rest of Europe afterwards. This means almost every late Neanderthal we know about, all the way from Spain to the Caucasus, traces back to that one small, surviving population rather than a patchwork of separate groups. What this genetic record ultimately reveals isn't just how Neanderthals vanished, but how fragile survival can be, resting sometimes on a single population's fortune to endure.
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