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My personal theory is that Neandertals didn’t mind eating a Cro Magnon now and then, to change their diet. They may be our trolls and hobgoblins of legend.

IIRC scientists agreed that Neandertals didn’t have the vocal cords to produce complex speech patterns... and their frontal lobes weren’t very developed, although the other parts of their brain were quite large. They could probably remember every edible and poisonous plant in the forest, the migration patterns of every animal, and every hunting ground they’d ever visited... but they couldn’t communicate this knowledge to each other, it all relied on personal experience. One Neandertal learned to put a sharp stone on the end of a stick because he’d seen another Neandertal do it... the idea of a bow that could launch a sharp stick was as far beyond them as launching a Saturn V to the moon.

I’m sure Cro Magnons were terrified of them, and after a few humans got eaten, used their communication skills, strategized, and wiped out the Neandertals with superior numbers and superior weapons. Neandertal survivors were probably driven from the prime hunting grounds, and survived only as isolated bands in far forest fastnesses and inaccessible places the Cro-Magnons didn’t want. Just as elderly or starving lions will sometimes turn maneater, isolated Neandertals living on the brink of starvation would have fallen on unsuspecting humans regardless of, and probably unable to conceive the inevitable fact that their depredations would alert humans that Neandertals were in the area, and afterwards result in a coordinated human drive to flush them out and kill them.

Even after the Neandertals were all gone, I’m sure Cro Magnon men told stories of their heroic forbears who had slain the mighty monsters, in a manner similar to the telling of the tale of Beowulf, and that mothers told their children to be good, or the trolls would eat you, and not to go into the forest alone without your father, because Grendel was there.