Revisiting research and challenging conclusions

We all enjoy stories about new discoveries, and it is these that tend to grab the news headlines, but there is another kind of story that gets far less coverage: those that contradict an earlier claim. In that category is the finding that our species – Homo sapiens – may not have been responsible for the extinction of our close relations, H neanderthalensis. According to previous thinking, we outcompeted Neanderthals because of our superior linguistic skills and tactical teamwork when hunting red deer and other large mammals. The migration of H sapiens into Europe c.60,000 years ago has been characterised as the beginning of the end for the ‘less intelligent’ Neanderthals, who lost o