Neanderthal

• 1. Introduction

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  Neanderthals roamed Europe and Western and Central Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, surviving glacial periods that drove other creatures to extinction, hunting woolly mammoths and straight-tusked elephants, and burying their dead with flowers. Then, roughly 40,000 years ago, they vanished. What happened to them, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of being human?

  The name itself carries an unexpected origin. The Neander Valley in Germany, where the first recognised fossil was found in 1856, was named after a late 17th century theologian and hymn writer, Joachim Neander, whose own grandfather had changed the family name from the German Neumann, meaning "new man", to the Graeco-Roman form Neander. So the ancient humans who would bear this name were inadvertently linked to a man who meant "new man" in two languages.

  For more than a century after that 1856 discovery, scientists argued over whether Neanderthals were our brutish inferiors, our evolutionary ancestors, or something else entirely. The answer, when it finally arrived in 2010 through genetic sequencing, surprised nearly everyone. Neanderthals were not simply a dead branch on the human family tree. Their DNA lives in us still.

• 2. Bones and Brains

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  Neanderthal 1, the type specimen found in the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte, comprised the cranium, thigh bones, right arm, left humerus and ulna, left ilium, part of the right shoulder blade, and pieces of the ribs. A local schoolteacher, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, recognised these bones as distinct from modern humans and passed them to the German anthropologist Hermann Schaaffhausen in 1857.

  What those bones revealed challenges the "caveman" image that has followed Neanderthals through popular culture. Their brain volume averaged 1,640 cubic centimetres for males and 1,460 for females, larger than the averages for all living human populations. The largest known Neanderthal brain, from the specimen called Amud 1, measured 1,736 cubic centimetres, one of the largest ever recorded in any human. Yet the organisation of that brain differed from modern humans in regions associated with cognition and language, which may help explain why their behaviour, as read from the archaeological record, appears comparatively simpler than that of the Cro-Magnons who eventually replaced them.

  Their bodies were built for cold. Wide chests, short limbs, and proportionally greater lung capacity suited a glacial climate. Male hips were approximately 31% wider than those of modern human males. Neanderthals had relatively more fast-twitch muscle fibres and much higher caloric demands than modern humans. Despite the persistent image of hunched primitives, adult Neanderthals ranged from about 147.5 to 177 cm in height, comparable to pre-industrial Europeans. West Asian Neanderthals were taller and more slightly built than their European counterparts.

  Variants associated with red hair have been found in some Neanderthal specimens, suggesting they were not a uniformly dark-haired people. Neanderthal pigmentation genes found in modern non-African people are associated with both lighter and darker skin tones, pointing toward a range of appearances across their population.

• 3. A Science Built on Mistakes

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  In 1864, Irish geologist William King, who had proposed the name Homo neanderthalensis just a year earlier, recommended placing Neanderthals in a different genus from modern humans entirely. He compared the Neanderthal braincase to that of a chimpanzee and argued they were "incapable of moral and theistic conceptions."

  The pathologist Rudolf Virchow pushed back not with generosity but with misdiagnosis. In 1872, he interpreted Neanderthal physical characteristics as evidence of senility, disease, and malformation in a single individual rather than as traits of an ancient species. This interpretation stalled serious Neanderthal research until the end of the century.

  French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule dealt the next damaging blow. Beginning in 1908, he described the French specimen La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, known as "The Old Man", as a slouching, ape-like creature with little connection to modern humans. Boule's ideas shaped public and scientific understanding of Neanderthals for decades. He also proposed two lineages in Ice Age Europe, one of which traced descent through the Piltdown Man, later revealed to be an outright hoax.

  By the mid-twentieth century, the question of whether Neanderthals represented a phase through which modern humans had passed, or a separate dead-end lineage, remained genuinely open. The first specimen found before anyone understood what they were looking at, Engis 2, a skull recovered in Belgium in 1829 by Dutch/Belgian prehistorian Philippe-Charles Schmerling, had simply been logged as poorly developed human remains buried alongside extinct animals. Gibraltar 1, presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society in 1848, was initially classified as a modern human skull. The science had to catch up to what the bones already knew.

• 4. Hunters and Foragers

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  At the 125,000-year-old Neumark-Nord site in Germany, the evidence suggests Neanderthals hunted straight-tusked elephants on a regular cycle, perhaps every five to six years. This was not scavenging. Neanderthals are now classified as apex predators.

  Across Europe, their prey included red deer, reindeer, horse, aurochs, ibex, and steppe bison. In Southwest Asia, they hunted mountain gazelle, Persian fallow deer, wild goat, and camels. Waterside communities along the Gibraltar coast ate dolphin and Mediterranean monk seal at Vanguard Cave. At Gibraltar sites more broadly, butchered remains of 143 different bird species have been found, among them the common quail, corn crake, woodlark, and crested lark.

  At Kebara Cave in Israel, over 50 species of seeds, nuts, fruits, and cereals have been recovered, demonstrating a sophisticated knowledge of plant resources. At Cueva del Sidrón in Spain, chemical evidence suggests Neanderthals may have used yarrow and camomile, either as flavourings or medicines. At Grotte du Lazaret in France, the remains of twenty-three red deer, six ibexes, three aurochs, and one roe deer appear to have been hunted in a single autumn season, timed to when male and female herds converged for rut.

  Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord may have been rendering fat from animal bones specifically to avoid protein toxicity, a precise nutritional calculation. Their knowledge of medicinal plants appears to have been comparable to that of Cro-Magnons. In 2026, a study published in PLOS One described a Neanderthal molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in southwestern Siberia, designated Chagyrskaya 64, dating to approximately 59,000 years ago, with a deep hole drilled into the chewing surface using a fine-pointed stone tool, extending into the pulp chamber in a manner consistent with deliberate cavity treatment. Subsequent wear on the tooth indicates the individual survived the procedure.

• 5. Technology and Fire

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  Neanderthals produced the Mousterian stone tool industry using the Levallois technique, refining an approach they had inherited from the earlier Acheulean industry. After developing this technology, there is a roughly 150,000-year period of relative stagnation in stone tool innovation, which researchers have linked to their small and dispersed population, limiting the spread and retention of complex ideas across generations.

  For spear-making, they selected materials with specific properties. The 400,000-year-old Clacton Spear from Britain and the 120,000-year-old Lehringen Spear from Germany were both made from European yew, a wood chosen for its material qualities. The 300,000-year-old Schöningen spears from Germany, by contrast, appear to have been designed for throwing rather than thrusting.

  Neanderthals also invented the earliest known dry distillation process, used to produce birch tar from bark, a substance with both adhesive and medicinal properties. A complex underground apparatus made this possible. The oldest evidence for dry distillation among modern humans dates only to 20,000 years ago, meaning Neanderthals preceded modern humans in this technology by potentially 180,000 years.

  At Abric Romaní rock shelter in Spain, Neanderthals may have maintained eight evenly spaced hearths arranged against a rock wall, likely for warmth during sleep. They appear to have zoned living spaces for distinct purposes: knapping, butchering, maintaining hearths, and storing wood. Their only known clothing tools are hide scrapers, suggesting garments resembling blankets or ponchos rather than fitted clothes, a distinction with real survival consequences in open terrain far from shelter.

• 6. Symbols and Burials

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  At Cueva Antón, 115,000-year-old perforated shell beads were possibly strung together to make a necklace. A 2020 study found evidence of a three-ply cord fragment made from conifer inner-bark fibres at Abri du Maras in France, capable of use in knitting light items such as strings for beads. Neanderthals may have produced finger flutings on the walls of La Roche-Cotard over 57,000 years ago.

  Gibraltarian palaeoanthropologists Clive and Geraldine Finlayson proposed that Neanderthals used bird parts, especially black feathers, as artistic media. At Gibraltar sites, the golden eagle was disproportionately butchered compared to other birds of prey or corvids. In 2019, the Finlaysons speculated this reflected a symbolic relationship with the eagle, paralleling the reverence some modern human societies have shown toward it.

  In Shanidar Cave in Iraq, one grave was found associated with pollen from yarrow, centaury, ragwort, grape hyacinth, joint pine, and hollyhock, flowers that may have been in bloom at the time of burial. American archaeologist Ralph Solecki interpreted this as evidence of a healer or spiritual figure. A competing explanation holds that a small burrowing rodent deposited the pollen after the burial. The grave of another individual at Shanidar, designated Shanidar 1, reveals a person who had survived an amputation of the right arm likely following a bone fracture in adolescence, plus osteomyelitis on the left clavicle, an abnormal gait, vision problems in the left eye, and possible hearing loss.

  That Shanidar 1 survived all of this suggests sustained care from others. The graves of children at various sites were associated with artefacts and bones as grave goods, with particular attention given to the youngest burials.

• 7. Interbreeding and Legacy

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  The first Neanderthal genome sequence, published in 2010, confirmed what English anthropologist Thomas Huxley had speculated as early as 1890 and Danish ethnographer Hans Peder Steensby had proposed in 1907: Neanderthals and modern humans had interbred. The genetic evidence points to at least two interbreeding episodes outside of Africa, one roughly 250,000 years ago and another between 40,000 and 54,000 years ago.

  Any individual whose ancestry traces beyond sub-Saharan Africa may carry approximately 2% Neanderthal DNA. Sub-Saharan Africans can also carry Neanderthal DNA, apparently derived from populations that migrated back into Africa after interbreeding. In total, approximately 20% of the Neanderthal genome appears to have survived in the modern human gene pool. This inherited DNA derives primarily from the children of female modern humans and male Neanderthals.

  Neanderthals in the Siberian Altai Mountains also interbred with the local Denisovan population, and about 17% of the genome of one Altai Denisovan specimen derived from Neanderthals. The Denisovans are known only through their genetic signature rather than any distinctive anatomy, making their relationship to Neanderthals particularly difficult to untangle.

  A 2026 study confirmed a sex bias in these mating patterns, finding that sexual selection was the primary driver, meaning the asymmetry reflects preference rather than simple demographic imbalance. Some Neanderthal genes that survived in modern humans appear to have provided advantages related to immune response, metabolism, and skeletal development, helping modern human populations adapt faster to new environments.

• 8. Extinction

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  The replacement of Middle Palaeolithic Mousterian stone technology with the modern human Upper Palaeolithic Aurignacian technology across Europe took place between 39,000 and 41,000 years ago. In Catalonia and Aragón in northern Spain, the Mousterian may have persisted to about 39,000 years ago; in southern Spain and Gibraltar, potentially to 32,000 to 35,000 years ago.

  Neanderthal extinction has been attributed to several overlapping causes. Archaeological evidence suggests the initial Cro-Magnon population was ten times higher than Neanderthal populations. A higher birth rate, more complex technologies, and greater long-distance mobility gave modern humans structural advantages. Infant mortality among Neanderthals was estimated at about 43% in northern Eurasia. In a sample of 206 Neanderthal individuals, about 80% of those who lived past age 20 died before reaching 40.

  The Laschamp event, between 39,000 and 42,000 years ago, may have increased ultraviolet radiation. Without fitted clothes to block UV exposure, and without the consistent use of ochre as possible sunscreen, Neanderthals may have been disproportionately affected compared to Cro-Magnons. The Campanian Ignimbrite eruption has also been proposed as a possible depopulation trigger, potentially leaving territories empty that modern humans then recolonised faster.

  The Châtelperronian industry of central France and northern Spain may represent Neanderthals adopting modern human techniques through direct contact. Some populations may have been absorbed into modern human groups rather than simply replaced. The effective population of Neanderthals had likely never risen above an estimated 3,000 to 12,000 reproducing individuals, a constraint that appears to have persisted across their entire history in Europe and ultimately narrowed their options when their world changed.