Neanderthals' social isolation may have sped up their extinction

Thorin Oakenshield

Unfortunately greed was the Neanderthal's downfall.

After Smaug was defeated they decided to lock themselves under the mountain with their treasure rather than to spend a trifling amount of gold to pay back Lake Town...

I was gonna say "worth it" but

“The Thorin population spent 50,000 years without exchanging genes with other Neanderthal populations,” Ludovic Slimak, a study co-author archeologist from France’s Université Toulouse Paul Sabatier who first discovered Thorin, said in a statement. “We thus have 50 millennia during which two Neanderthal populations, living about 10 days’ walk from each other, coexisted while completely ignoring each other. This would be unimaginable for a Sapiens and reveals that Neanderthals must have biologically conceived our world very differently from us Sapiens.”

That's actually quite interesting for the "how come there was no other civilization in the many tens of thousands of years that humans existed before our civilization that's barely 6000 years old" crowd.

Maybe that was their take on the "dark forest" hypothesis.

Slimak speculates that Thorin’s population likely migrated south to France from Gibraltar.

Wow, that's a long walk, to get to France from Gibralter by going south!

you don't know me!