Scientists are now debating whether interbreeding with modern humans occurred and why all of these Neanderthal groups appear to have gone extinct.
"It does look, from a variety of data, that Neanderthals were subject to episodes of extreme scarcity, with which their cultural and social systems sometimes couldn’t cope," said Steven Kuhn, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.
He added, "There could also be a link between boom-and-bust subsistence and occasional cannibalism."
Kuhn and colleague Mary Stiner theorize that modern humans better divided labor along the lines of gender and age. Instead of everyone working toward the next big kill, women and children in early modern human groups devised other food-obtaining strategies, such as gathering fruits and nuts.
Such diversification underlies our success, even today.
"It is clear that the kinds of cooperative, diversified economies practiced by recent hunter gatherers are ‘underwritten by’ our sophisticated cognitive and communicative abilities," Kuhn explained.
"That’s what allows people to negotiate and maintain their complex patterns of dependency and cooperation, keep each other in line, etc., but whether the cognitive development is cause or consequence isn’t clear to us."
