Neanderthals weathered the toughest of conditions in order to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Battling wild horses and woolly mammoths at close range, living through both climate change and ice ages, Homo Neanderthalensis proved themselves as an enduring species.



They were not the brutish dimwits commonly portrayed in popular media. They were intelligent beings, with language, who loved, feared, envied, laughed, sang, and grieved.



They were masters of stone tools, able to "read" the quality of a stone the way we might read a book - and to craft it into tools that were the pillar of their species' longevity. Their intelligence exceeded that of all previous hominids; they were able to organize hunting teams consisting of dozens of men and women, build shelters out of mammoth bones, and to create birch pitch (glue) using very complicated methods.

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Their way of life continued, unchanging, for much longer than Homo Sapiens have been around. Why, then, did Neanderthals suddenly vanish?