Thanks Bob Ireland. Just adding, not pinging, because I think this or something like it has appeared. Also, it's a fact that moderns carry DNA that is also found in the Neandertal remains (and very little has survived), meaning they are not cousins, but ancestors. By definition, that means they didn't go extinct.
Of course, the problem with the late Allan Wilson (died of cancer) was that he was coming at the Neandertal question from the same brain-dead, dead-end alley of Virchow and Darwin, both of whom cherry-picked morphological data. When Wilson was still alive, DNA research hadn't reached anything close to the current level, but it's my guess that, had he seen it, he'ds till cling to the same cryptoracist view.
The Neandertal Enigma"Allan Wilson had always been described to me in superlatives, such as 'one of the real geniuses in science,' or 'the most arrogant guy I know...' [H]e apologized for putting me off so long and bluntly explained that the reason he had done so was that he did not trust me... 'The anthropological perspective on evolution is no longer valid; it has been overthrown. And yet the science writers who insist on talking to me come drenched in an anthropological perspective, and there is really no point in talking to them... It is paralytic. It prevents you from asking certain questions, and it forces you to ask others. The whole discipline invites you not to investigate.'
by James Shreeve
...A few months before my visit, Wilson had announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science... that the Neandertals were replaced because they could not speak... suggesting that a particular gene for language might have been carried in the mitochondria themselves. Since invading males would have been more likely to mate with resident females than the other way around, the offspring of sexual contact between the two groups would be 'linguistically deaf-mute,' like their Neandertal mothers. Thus disadvantaged, these 'village idiots' would face the same fate as the mothers: extinction. Only the language-endowed African lineage would continue. The language gene idea, and especially the unfortunate term 'village idiots,' elicited hoots of derision from the anti-Eve camp, and gave no joy to Wilson's colleagues." [pp 119-121]