Tales From the Neanderthal Nights: Why They Really Disappeared
There seems less interest today in maintaining a “subhuman” status for our Neanderthal ancestors. It’s good if that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.
mindmatters.ai
A critical part of the original tale of the Neanderthals is that, because they were stupid, we smarter, more evolved modern humans finished them off. It was a classic Darwinian tale of the struggle for survival.
Later, when the human genome was mapped, some of our Neanderthal ancestors winked back at us. So the story had to be revised to account for interactions that were not, shall we say, wholly hostile…
But still, we were told, the Neanderthal is definitely extinct, just like T. rex and the elephant bird.
Now a new paper offers a different approach. Carly Cassella reports at Science Alert,
A new mathematical model has explored a fascinating scenario in which Neanderthals gradually disappeared not through “true extinction” but through genetic absorption into a more prolific species:
Us.
According to the analysis, the long and drawn-out ‘love affair’ between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could have led to almost complete genetic absorption within 10,000–30,000 years.
“Neanderthals May Never Have Truly Gone Extinct, Study Reveals,” November 13, 2025
