Seen here, this early creature would evolve into a serious killing machine ...
Neandeerthrall ping.
Hmmmm, Reindeer!!!!!!!!
This enabled the Neanderthals to keep the herds thin enough so that competitors could not move in.
Once the Neanderthals were out of the way the Cro-Magnons moved in ~ at once demonstrating that they had an inferior hunting technique. They didn't gain the upper hand over the reindeer, cattle, elk and deer for another 30,000 years.
It is known that the Sa'ami, Yakutz and Chug-chi hunters developed a method for using "tame reindeer" to attract wild reindeer who were then easily killed. The Sa'ami went further and invented skis, and that put them right up at the top of the top predator pile and drove out the large cats AND wolves from the regions they hunted. (A Sa'ami skiing downhill into a reindeer heard is faster than a wolf, or a reindeer BTW)
There are a couple of claims about where the "tame reindeer" came from ~ it's pretty sure the Sa'ami didn't domesticate them, but the Chug-chi may have, and quite possibly the Nenets and others could very well have done so in the era before the tame wolf (aka "dog").
I'd like to propose that the Neanderthals figured out how to "tame" a reindeer to attract the herds. That gave them a LOCK on the livestock! In the meantime the Cavebears dealt with the Sabre-tooths ~ in a deadly long term balance which benefited the smaller predators ~ to wit, the wolves, foxes, humans.
"This sophisticated hunting behavior..."
Doesn't that kind of describe Grizzly bears and Salmon runs? Are Griz sophisticated?
These people should enter the olympics. You have to have strong leg muscles to leap this far for conclusions.