2024-09-11 16:46:10
HISTORY – The nearly complete jaw unearthed in Mandrin Cave will belong to a lineage that was isolated for more than 50,000 years until the extinction of the species.
It is not the best-known Paleolithic site in France. It does not have the beauty of Chauvet, Lascaux or Cosquer caves. Yet year after year, scientific publications follow each other on this small cave in the Drôme mountains. Mandrin cave is gradually establishing itself as a unique site, of rare archaeological wealth. Published for more than thirty years under the direction of Ludovic Slimak, researcher at the Center for Anthrobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, it has been regularly used by people for 120,000 years and until the Neolithic.
Of those in it, Wise man which were among the first of their kind to occupy Europe 54,000 years ago. But even most Neanderthals, this human group’s relationship to ours disappeared a little more than 40,000 years ago. A fossil discovered in a cave in 2015 (the first discovered in France in more than fifty years) has just given us its geometry…
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