Mirror to humans: Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo poses with a replica of a Neanderthal skeleton at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, October 3, 2022.
| Photo Credit: AP
Pursuing the mystery of how the Neanderthals went extinct, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and of Montreal have now asserted that climate change was not the primary reason. Instead, they have reported that Homo sapiens succeeded because of their better social connectivity whereas the Neanderthals’ populations suffered the effects of poor social connections.
The findings, published on April 1 Quaternary Science Reviews, were based on habitat suitability modelling: using algorithms to estimate where ancient humans might have preferred to live based on simulations of the climate over 60,000 years.
Published – April 26, 2026 02:17 pm IST
