c. 400,000 – 40,000 BCE · Europe and Western Asia
Neanderthals: the other humans of Eurasia
Dominant across Europe and western Asia for hundreds of millennia, Neanderthals overlapped with the first modern humans to arrive — and interbred with them — before disappearing around 40,000 years ago.
Once depicted as a 'primitive cousin', Neanderthals look quite different in light of the past half-century of research: a hardy, broad-chested human species physically adapted to the cold of glacial Eurasia, with brains on average larger than ours.
They were skilled toolmakers (the Mousterian industry), cooperated to bring down large game, buried their dead, and used red pigment. Hand stencils and abstract motifs dated to 65,000 years ago in Spanish caves — too early to be the work of modern humans — show that symbolic thought was not unique to our lineage.
A curious twist: between 1 and 4 percent of the genome of every present-day non-African human is Neanderthal. When modern humans expanded across Eurasia 70,000–50,000 years ago, the two species met, interbred, and left a genetic legacy. By around 40,000 years ago — when the last Neanderthal populations vanished from the Iberian Peninsula — we were the only human species left on Earth. Why? The question is still open: climate shifts, disease, competition, inbreeding in shrinking populations — all are debated.
Sources
- Neanderthals — Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
- U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art — Science