So, what happened to the Neanderthals? Does anyone really know? If you were wondering too then lets walk through this now. Did they die out, were they killed off, or do some of them still live among us to this day? These are the key questions that I will try to answer here. It was only 21,000 years ago that Neanderthals were thought to have died out.

About 40,000 years ago Cor-Magnon Man explode onto the landscape in Europe.70,000 years ago there were modern man else where in the old world when the Neanderthals come into existence around 68,000 years ago, and seem to be living side-by-side with Modern man. Although the two groups seem to be human they are different enough that it is thought that there could not be any interbreeding between the two. This is what most of the scientists believe now, although this can change with new evidence. Still the evidence is very strong that the two groups stayed separate. But, there is some small chance that there was some interbreeding early on when the two groups whee closer together on the evolutionary tree. The DNA between Humans a Neanderthals has some 'markers' that seem to match, suggesting that there was some kind of interbreeding going on. Either way Humans continued to breed faster and grow stronger over taking the Neanderthals. The expanded their population to every part of the globe. The neanderthals on the other hand, at some point were no longer viable, and dropped off the face of the world. Some scientist believe that Humans wiped out the Neanderthals in some kind of war, or hunted them like animals till they were extinct. Others believe that the two groups were able to co-exist, but in the end, the neanderthals just could not deal with the changing climate and died out. So, lets look at these ideas and together we may find out what really happened to the neanderthals.

Neanderthals were very robust homo sapiens (Homo neanderthalensis) that live 21,000 to 68,000 years ago. They had large brains similar in size to Modern Man. Their large bones suggest that they had powerful arms, legs and jaws. They might have looked like a cross between an ape and a modern man. They may have lived to be approximately 30 years old, on average. They may have even buried the dead in shallow graves. Showing they had a sense of what death was.

Living in small social groups, it is unknown if they had language as we do today, or some sort of grunts and growls. They had large enough brains and the vocal capacity to speak. They were known to have some sort of social network. They also had some simple forms of art and were able to use tools. The tool they used ranged from simple scrapers to more complex task-oriented tools. The Neanderthals hunted for their food. They used spears at a very short rang for hunting. They used fire to a limited extent. This use of fire may have allowed them to be the first homo sapiens to leave the temperate zone.

Modern man(Humans) are anatomically the same 40,000 years ago as they are today. They lived in small to medium sized social groups. The seemed to even trade with outside groups for needed resources. They might have has enough language to live in lager social groups then did the neanderthals. The early modern Man also had a form simple art. They had simple tools, like scrapers, but they were able to make much more complicated tool as well. They also used spears for hunting. There use of fire helped the to survive the inclement weather and climate change.

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