SUR LES CHEMINS DE L'HUMANITÉ

The Friends of the Arago Laboratory are joining forces with Culture et Patrimoine en Côte Vermeille to bring you three evenings of exploration "On the Paths of Humanity".
-On the 17th, a lecture by Pierre Justeau, University of Bordeaux
-On the 18th, a lecture by Vincenzo Celiberti, Université de Perpignan, CNRS, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
-On the 19th, a documentary (CNRS-Arte) presented by its director Pascal Cuissot.
The three sessions will take place in the amphitheatre of the Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls, at 6pm.

17 September, 6pm: Pierre Justeau
"Archaeogenetics and Cultural Mixtures: The Impact of Migrations on the Advent of the Neolithic in Western Europe".
Summary:
More than ten millennia ago, in the Near East, humanity entered a new era: the Neolithic. This was a tipping point at which hunter-gatherer human groups became farmers and sedentary, and societies began to take on a hierarchical structure, laying the foundations for what is now the modern world. But while this major transition gradually spread to Europe, the process was neither uniform nor instantaneous.
Thanks to palaeogenomics, which makes it possible to sequence DNA preserved in bones, we can now trace the paths of the first farmers from the Near East and their encounters with the local populations of Europe. Two major diffusion routes are emerging: a continental route via the Danube, and another along the Mediterranean coast.
Genetic data reveals a complex pattern: little mixing between populations at the outset, but increasing interbreeding over the millennia, varying from region to region. In France, where the Neolithic first appeared in the sixth millennium BC, the available data suggests a transition marked by regional variations in the ways in which local populations interacted with farming groups.
The Neolithic period was not just a technological revolution, but also marked a profound recomposition of the genetic profiles of prehistoric Europeans - an essential turning point in our understanding of our origins.

Pierre Justeau is a post-doctoral researcher in palaeogenomics at the University of Bordeaux and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Evolution in Leipzig (D). He will be defending his thesis in Palaeogenomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Huddersfield (UK) in 2021 on the theme: "Sex-specific processes in European prehistory and beyond". He was recruited as a bioinformatics engineer at the University of Aix-Marseille (ADES Laboratory) in 2021, before joining the University of Bordeaux in 2022.
He is particularly interested in human migrations during the Neolithic period, which he is studying using recent paleogenomic tools.

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18 September, 6pm: Vincenzo Celiberti
"Neanderthals: our little-known ancestors"
Summary:
Neanderthal, often perceived as a "rustic cousin" of Homo sapiens, has long been poorly understood. Living mainly in Europe between around 300,000 and 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals adapted to a variety of environments, from dense, humid forests to icy steppes. With a robust stature and elongated skull, with a larger cranial capacity than our own, Neanderthals were perfectly adapted to their time and environment.
Contrary to the stereotypical image of a primitive caveman, recent research reveals that Neanderthal had advanced skills and unsuspected abilities. Humanist, supportive, empathetic, pacifist and ... ecologist, he was not so different from us Homo sapiens... He lived in groups, painted caves and wore ornaments; he played music, buried the dead and treated the sick, with a fairly well-developed pharmacopoeia. These recent discoveries bear witness to their ability to express and produce emotions. Neanderthal was therefore much more technologically and socially advanced than previously thought. What's more, recent genetic studies have revealed that Neanderthals, those astonishing ancestors of humankind, interacted with our Homo sapiens ancestors, leaving an imprint in our DNA. Around 1-3% of the DNA of people of non-African origin comes from Neanderthals, which underlines the importance of these interactions in our evolutionary history.
Today, Neanderthals are recognised not just as ancestors, but as human beings in their own right, with their own cultures and ways of life. By exploring his story, we discover not only our roots, but also the richness of human diversity through time. The Neanderthal, far from being a mere relic of the past, continues to fascinate and enrich our understanding of human evolution. Their resilience and ingenuity remind us that our history is far more complex and nuanced than we might think.
The more we learn about this species (and the other Hominid species that came before us), the more we understand that other species possess surprising and enriching cognitive abilities...

Vincenzo Celiberti is a prehistoric archaeologist and researcher at the UPVD, University of Perpignan, within the UMR 7194 HNHP (Histoire Naturelle de l'Humanité Préhistorique) of the CNRS - MNHN-UPVD-Centre Européen de Recherches Préhistorique de Tautavel). He has participated in and personally directed several excavation campaigns and studies of lithic industries abroad, He has published, as principal author or co-author, more than fifty scientific articles and a dozen monographs. He is also a research fellow at the Italian Institute of Human Palaeontology in Rome and at the Fundacion Instituto de Investigacion de Prehistoria y Evolucion Humana in Lucena, Spain.

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19 September, 6pm: Screening
"Thorin: the last Neanderthal
In the presence of the director: Pascal Cuissot
Production: Fred Hilgemann Film
Participation: CNRS-images, Distribution: Arte,
Summary :
Thorin, the Neanderthal exhumed from a cave in the Drôme, provides precious clues to the disappearance of his species. This exceptional discovery is revolutionising our knowledge of the occupation of the Mediterranean basin in prehistoric times.
In 2015, the discovery of a large number of Neanderthal fossils in the Mandrin cave, in the heart of the Rhône valley, was the starting point for a breathtaking archaeological thriller. Dated, after many twists and turns, at around 40,000 years old, this late representative of Neanderthal, named Thorin after Tolkien's dwarf king, provides new clues about this species, which lived on the Eurasian continent for 300,000 years before mysteriously dying out. Why did it disappear in favour of Homo sapiens, our ancestor? That's what prehistorian Ludovic Slimak and his team are trying to find out. For the last twenty years, they have been exploring the Mandrin cave, which has been occupied for eighty thousand years and miraculously preserved thanks to the sands carried by the Mistral wind rushing through its northern opening. While the analysis of soot, a new method of investigation, is also making it possible to determine with unprecedented precision the frequency of occupation of the site, the archaeologists' excavations are revealing that Neanderthals not only survived in the south of France but probably even rubbed shoulders with Homo sapiens around the 54th millennium BC. Another major discovery: research on the strange flint points in the archaeological layer from this period suggests that the first Homo sapiens to settle in the cave were already hunting with bows and arrows, some forty thousand years before the accepted date of the invention of archery!
From the excavation sites to the laboratories, this captivating investigation, which brings together multi-disciplinary knowledge - archaeology, traceology, palaeogenetics, etc. - and passionate researchers, lifts the veil on one of the greatest enigmas of prehistory and brings to light the untold story of the meeting of two human species in the south of France. The first Neanderthal fossil to be unearthed for fifty years, Thorin, whose DNA links him to cousins from southern Europe, is the first evidence of an entirely new Mediterranean branch of his species, before their disappearance, which was much more gradual than previously imagined.

Pascal Cuissot is a film-maker who has made a number of top-quality documentaries: Eiffel Tower: A Visionary's Dream, Time of the Dinosaurs, Secrets of the Coliseum, When Homo Sapiens Made Movies, Gaudi, Vauban: Sweat Saves Blood, Rio de Janeiro, Marvellous City...

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