In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist says that as a young man he dedicated himself to observing people while playing the bagpipes dressed in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. By an unconscious impulse he had decided to master that instrument, and he succeeded, to the point of having a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig and, in the end, he quit. But he was able to get his doctorate with the money he made playing.
Thanks to that, Slimak has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter of our species with the humans closest to us. One of their latest discoveries is Thorin, who lived about 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, the A wise man we became the only human species on the planet.
In his new book, (Debate), Slimak, born in Vercors, France, 52 years ago, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of those human brothers, and what it says about ourselves. “It is a sad book,” he highlights, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals made cave art and had sex and children with our own species—which has left a bit of their DNA in our genome—the scientist at the French National Research Center believes that they disappeared alone and finished. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions by videoconference from his beautiful house, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees.
Ask. What story do Thorin’s remains tell?
Answer. The moment of Neanderthal extinction is invisible, impossible to touch, we have no data. What we learned about Thorin, after almost 10 years of research, is that he belonged to the classic Neanderthals of Europe, and that when he died he was isolated. But not from a geographical or physical point of view.
P. In what sense then?
R. Mandrin Cave is in the Rhône Valley, which is a huge migration corridor between the Mediterranean and mainland Europe. It is a place for contact and exchange, but Thorin’s DNA tells us that his group had been isolated for about 60,000 years. And there were other Neanderthals just a two-week walk from this place. How is it possible? I think because they rejected contact.
P. Is it possible to spend so much time isolated?
R. They were happy in their little valleys. They didn’t want to explore the world or spread their genes. It is something radically different from us, who are explorers by definition. We have been to Greenland, and now we want to go to Mars. This goes beyond genetics, it is a deeper and more interesting problem: Is it possible that for Neanderthals their relationship with the world was to have a small territory and stay there forever?
P. What does that say about their mind, were they more or less intelligent?
R. The problem is that we define intelligence in comparison to our own. But there are animals that are super intelligent. In valleys of Africa, very different chimpanzee cultures are known that live separated by a river. It is very difficult to imagine these types of divergent minds, but we are surrounded by them. We have to accept that A wise man It is not the definition of human, nor of intelligence. The real question is how that other mind worked.
P. Is it possible to find out?
R. It is not only a matter of culture, but of ethology, of behavior. If I raised a Neanderthal baby as my own child, there would be no problem with the bond. The question is whether, when he grew up, he would understand the world the same as my other children. He probably absorbed my culture and traditions, but no. There would be something inside him that would condition him to see the world his way; limits that not even the culture I taught him could close.
P. In his book he concludes that they disappeared due to the collapse of their “mental sphere.” What does it mean?
R. In the book I talk about the story of Ishi, a Yahi Indian who lived in present-day California. Ishi suddenly appears in Oroville in 1911. Nobody expected that there would still be wild Indians, naked with their bow and arrows, in that area. What happened was that Ishi’s group consciously turned into shadows, hid from the whites and acted as if they did not exist. They lived like this for a century and a half, without any contact with Westerners. Their territory was getting smaller and smaller. They were hunter gatherers, they needed to hunt without being seen. And in the end it became unsustainable. Ishi was the last of his lineage and, by his own decision, he decided to go to die where the Westerners are. He considered them demons and wanted them to kill him. They called anthropologists from all over the country, but they couldn’t get through to him. In fact, they never knew his name. It means human; he was just saying he was a human. There are many other examples. When these groups can hide, they hide. And if anyone finds them, they kill them.
For a few years I worked in Ethiopia and Djibouti. There are still tribes of nomadic hunters and warriors there. Contact with different cultures, such as the Western one, causes all their values to collapse, their way of understanding the world, the stories they tell their children, their mythologies. After contact, these stories become absurd. Children stop recognizing themselves in their parents, in their elders, they no longer want to continue. Many fall into drugs or alcohol. In the capital of , a large part of the population lives on drugs. The kids only dream of emigrating to Yemen, where the worst type of slavery imaginable awaits them.
P. And did something like this happen with the Neanderthals?
R. The tools of the sapiens . Neanderthals, on the other hand, had a much more unique and creative way, although much less efficient. It is clear to me that these humans collapsed on themselves. Depending on the area, they may have decided to become invisible, and in others they simply no longer wanted to live. It was an individual and social suicide of the population. This is how humans disappear, when they no longer want to continue living because their values have collapsed.
P. Does that say anything good about us, that we have prevailed?
R. This suicide, this collapse, is not because sapiens be bad The problem is that we have to be efficient. It’s something genetic. We all need to do the same thing at the same time. It’s terrifying. When you understand it, you see the history of the 20th century. How we were capable of genocide. The Germans did it, but it could have been any other country in Europe. How can we describe our tendency to reject difference? If we don’t get it, it will happen again. In Poland, during the 1970s, the Nazis suggested to a police battalion that they kill Jewish children with a bullet to the head. They weren’t forced, if they didn’t want to do it, that was fine. But despite this, he carried out the executions. It is our tendency towards synchronization, standardization, integration into the group, conformity and fear of being marginalized.
P. Humans also cure cancer, we reached the Moon, we have domesticated the atom…
R. Yes, we do good things. That capacity I speak of is one of the keys to our historical success. But the mechanisms that enable cooperation and institutional stability also make humans highly susceptible to collective alienation when the norm shifts toward violence or ecological destruction. My intention is not to sully the sapiensbut that by putting words to our frailties, to our dangers, we can begin to change them. My work has gone from excavating Neanderthal caves to trying to understand what we are and how to act to be better humans. Despite our science and knowledge, we remain blind. Being better requires cultivating the real desire to understand and love those who are different. Without recognizing our intrinsic behavior, there will be no change.
P. Could it be that the Neanderthal did not disappear alone, but living among sapienseven with one?
R. In this field it is easy to say almost anything, because the dating ranges are very wide. In the case of Thorin, for example, the fossil is between 40,000 and 45,000 years old, up or down a thousand years. But in Mandrin Cave we have analyzed the soot and we have seen that between the last Neanderthal fire and the first of the sapiens At most six months passed. That means they were in the same place, together, but not mixed up. When they are sapienswe only find tools sapiens; and the same thing happens with Neanderthals. Never together. I can’t help but think this is a sad story.
P. Are we still unable to see the other?
R. Completely. Look . The media debate focuses on geopolitics, resources, and the economy, ignoring that it is not an empty space: it is the home of Inuit populations with millennia of history. This blindness is not new. Already in 1955, the United States built the Thule base, the largest in the world outside its territory, in total secret, without consulting the inhabitants who lived there. Now, in 2026, we continue to deny that Greenland belongs to the Inuit.
P. Do you have any new discoveries?
R. Yes, I can’t give details because we are going to publish it in a scientific journal, maybe in two or three years. And about this period I will write my next book, which will be called something like The forest people. We are working at levels of more than 100,000 years, corresponding to a Europe covered by large primary forests. It is a fascinating phase and still very little known. We know very little about how human populations lived in these dense, closed landscapes. Our image of Neanderthals is too marked by cold and glaciation, but before the ice there was a forest. They could be populations that developed very specific ways of life in those environments. We are still beginning to understand it. We have work for years.
