They were subsumed by Homo Sapiens.............
Is this recreation of faces in soft tissue simulation more than just hopes and guesses? I wonder what the oldest preserved human is; i.e. Bog People from peat bogs, preserved in ice in Siberia, etc? Where we could actually at least sort of see a face?
That’s the assumption, if Neanderthals were human.
But interbreeding between two species, even supposedly close ones, results in a creature that is sterile.
Either it’s fully human or we didn’t breed with them at all.
If an “ape”, they were an ape with brains larger than ours that were apparently capable of producing, with Homo Sapiens partners, viable and fertile offsprings. All that suggests, genetically speaking, a branch of our species. Fertile products of interspecies breeding are extremely rare. As are animals that care for injured members and bury the dead with ceremony.
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Neanderthals were rapidly made extinct, along with archaic Homo sapiens, by the invasion of new Homo sapiens, sometimes referred to as Cro Magnon, who were the first "Humans" having power of cognitive thought (i.e., abstract thought including language). This was accompanied by a critical genetic marker known as the D-allele.
As we know, there was a limited amount of cross-breeding; but, it is more likely that was between Neanderthal and archaic Homo sapiens, who then had limited reproductive contact with the new, genius breed.
This invasion of our mentally-modern (as opposed to anatomically modern) human ancestors entered the world in north-central Eurasia somewhere around 40,000 years ago.