Latest Neanderthal genome sequence

Open Access
https://www.cell.com/cell-genomics/fulltext/S2666-979X(24)00177-0
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/dna-of-thorin-one-of-the-last-neanderthals-finally-sequenced-revealing-inbreeding-and-50-000-years-of-genetic-isolation
They think that this Neanderthal male existed 42,000 years ago.  This would make him the most recent find in terms of geologic age.  There is some evidence that Neanderthals existed until around 30,000 years ago, but we do not have fossil bones, just their tool set.  Like other Neanderthal individuals this one seems to be highly inbred and is the product of close relatives mating.  His sequence indicates that his people separated from the other extant Neanderthal lineages around 50,000 years before this individual existed.  Somehow this group of Neanderthals remained isolated in their valley for a very long time. They still retained the older Neanderthal tool set while their contemporaries in Western Europe had adopted a new method of making tools.
It sort of looks like the population went the way of the Wrangle Island Mammoths and inbreeding depression may have been one of factors involved in their eventual demise.
The modern humans that invaded Europe seemed to have a means to limit inbreeding.  One sex stayed with the clan and the other left to join other clans.
One thing about inbreeding is that it can mess with genetic relationship analysis.  Inbreeding causes loss of genetic variation in a population, so you have to try to determine how much different the haplotypes are from the those found in other populations, and try to separate the genetic distance due to loss of variation the population once had, from the variation that accumulated in the haplotypes that they still share with the other populations.  I do not know if this was done in this case.  Inbreeding sort of unzips a lineage and makes the branch length to that individual look longer than it actually is, but the longer branch length is due to the variation that has been lost, not gained.
Ron Okimoto