In an interesting short essay at The Conversation last month, University of Durham Paul Pettitt observed,
Despite the fact that we know that Neanderthals were capable of producing jewellery and using coloured pigments, there has been much objection to the notion that they explored deep caves and left art on the walls.
But recent work has confirmed beyond doubt that they did.
“Were Neanderthals capable of making art?, October 28, 2025
Why was there “much objection?” Did archaeologists feel that way about the Rosetta Stone? King Tut’s tomb? Not that I’ve heard.
Pettitt doesn’t quite spell out the nature of the problem but maybe we can help. Briefly, this echo from the past (Neanderthal as artist) is an unwelcome one in some quarters. As I noted here earlier, many archaeologists have long assumed that Neanderthals were less mentally evolved than modern humans. They are quite sure that there has been a long, slow, gradual, and completely natural Ascent of Man from mud to mind.
For any such Ascent, someone has to be the subhuman and at one time the Neanderthals seemed well adapted to the role.
Except, the history stopped co-operating. Time after time. And, predictably, few are thanking the Neanderthals for not being as stupid as needed.
When stories start to crumble, they are hard to uncrumble.
A critical part of the original tale of the Neanderthals is that, because they were stupid, we smarter, more evolved modern humans finished them off. It was a classic Darwinian tale of the struggle for survival.
Later, when the human genome was mapped, some of our Neanderthal ancestors winked back at us. So the story had to be revised to account for interactions that were not, shall we say, wholly hostile…
But still, we were told, the Neanderthal is definitely extinct, just like T. rex and the elephant bird.
Now a new paper offers a different approach. Carly Cassella reports at Science Alert,
A new mathematical model has explored a fascinating scenario in which Neanderthals gradually disappeared not through “true extinction” but through genetic absorption into a more prolific species:
Us.
According to the analysis, the long and drawn-out ‘love affair’ between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could have led to almost complete genetic absorption within 10,000–30,000 years.
“Neanderthals May Never Have Truly Gone Extinct, Study Reveals,” November 13, 2025
In this scenario, Neanderthals merely met the fate of countless minority groups through history. What became of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Hittites mentioned in the Bible? Some people living today could probably cite some of them as ancestors. But, like the Neanderthals, they disappeared as separate groups.
This is more like what we might expect, actually
It’s not mere storytelling to point out that young Neanderthals who came to a certain age probably often faced a fork in the road: live alone or live with a partner from the much larger group. And, as geneticists can tell us, many of them ended up on the latter fork…
that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted. (Steven E. Churchill, Kamryn
Keys, Ann H. Ross/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Cassella goes on to say,
Today, some scientists argue that there is more to unite Homo sapiens and Neanderthals than there is to differentiate us. Our lineages, they say, should not be regarded as two separate species, but rather as distinct populations belonging to a “common human species.”
Neanderthals were surprisingly adaptable and intelligent. They made intricate tools, created cave art, and used fire – and when it came to communication, they were probably capable of far more than simple grunting. “Never Have Truly Gone Extinct“
This is not the story we heard decades ago. But that is not just because science marches on. There also seems less interest these days in maintaining a “subhuman” status for our Neanderthal ancestors. It’s a good thing if that type of thing has begun to make many people uncomfortable.
A critical change in word choice
From the open access paper:
The disappearance of Neanderthals remains a subject of intense debate, with competing hypotheses attributing their demise to demographic decline, environmental change, competition with Homo sapiens, or genetic assimilation. Here, we present a mathematical model demonstrating that small-scale Homo sapiens immigrations into Neanderthal populations, providing recurrent gene mixing, could have led to almost complete genetic substitution over 10,000–30,000 years. Our model, grounded in neutral species drift, does not require selective advantage or catastrophic events but shows that sustained gene flow from a demographically larger species could account for Neanderthals’ genetic absorption into modern humans within a time-frame consistent with archaeological evidence.
Amadei, A., Lin, G. & Fattorini, S. A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans. Sci Rep 15, 38593 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-22376-6
Note the phrase “does not require selective advantage.” In other words, we don’t have to look for ways in which Neanderthals were “less evolved” in a Darwinian sense, in order to account for their disappearance as a separate group.
We don’t need to do that any more than we need to look for ways that the empire-building Hittites were “less evolved” than their successors. If they had been “more evolved” — but nonetheless a much smaller group, for any number of reasons, during a given period — they would face the same fate.
That’s because it’s arithmetic, not Darwinism. The nice thing about arithmetic is that it is much harder to either dispute — or make a questionable cause out of.
