Extinct People: Why Neanderthals Perished...

Just 28,000 years ago, the era of Neanderthals came to an end in the caves near the Strait of Gibraltar. We tend to think of them as crude, clumsy, and not very intelligent beings, easily outmatched by our agile and cunning ancestors… But was it really that simple? If we consider the genealogy of humanity as a diagram with intersecting branches, it turns out that there is a lot in common between different species of humans. Moreover, most of the traits of the so-called cognitive revolution were also present in Neanderthals. Clive Finlayson is convinced that the fate of Neanderthals and "modern humans" was determined by ecological factors. If the climate had not changed in our favor about 50 million years ago, everything could have turned out differently…