For more than a century, Neanderthals have been cast as a vanished side branch of the human family tree, a brief encounter in our deep past. The latest high resolution Neanderthal genome, combined ...

The basic outline of the interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals is now well established. The two came in contact as modern humans began their major expansion out of Africa, which occurred ...

Did modern humans erase Neanderthals, or did our close cousins fade away for reasons that had little to do with us? A pair of major papers in Science and Nature on Dec. 12, 2024, sharpen that question ...

A complex picture of how Neanderthals died out, and the role that modern humans played in their disappearance, is emerging.

Two recent studies of Neanderthal archaeological sites (one on the coast of Portugal and one in central Germany) demonstrate yet again that our extinct cousins were smarter and more adaptable than ...