Ignorant in today’s terms, maybe. But they were not ignorant of the skills needed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a harsh environment. Few of us could survive for long thrown back into even the most temperate of the interglacial periods with just our hands, feet and brains.
Then those darned Homo Sapiens came out of Africa, faded to white and outcompeted them for resources, killed some of them off and assimilated the rest.
EEEVIL white men!
If the Neanderthals were indeed human they had souls, and God in His mercy has dealt with them appropriately.
Every year academia produces 300 new hair-brained theories on what really killed off the Neanderthals. They are funny to read because they are typically projections of the theorist's twisted leftist views of the modern world. I have never read a single theory that said the Neanderthals were killed off in war but that is what Occam's razor overwhelmingly points to. Human means war maker but the leftists in academia just can't accept that. They want to believe war is a recent artificial invention that can be stamped out. Yet war has been the driver of most human evolution, the reason we evolved so amazingly quickly compared to other animals and why we developed intelligence far in excess of that needed to find food and shelter.