Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Shrinking the universe’s 13.8 billion years to a single 12-month period puts the dinosaurs shockingly close to Christmas, while the earliest Homo sapiens arrive only a few minutes before New Year’s fireworks.

It’s more that Neanderthals and H. sapiens reflect two diverging pathways of being human, each with their own oddities.

Neanderthals rode earth’s climate rollercoaster for hundreds of thousands of years, coping with the extremes in weather that went with it

Composite tools in themselves also imply impressive mental capacity to plan, design and anticipate.

Composite tools in themselves also imply impressive mental capacity to plan, design and anticipate

The more we look, the more we see that many of the things Neanderthals made moved considerable distances

Catching birds has long been believed an advanced hunting technique, so how did Neanderthals do it?

Strict carnivory actually starves the body, terminating in protein poisoning

Niggling assumptions persist that they must have been doing something fundamentally ‘wrong’ to explain why they disappeared, even though the archaeological reality leaves claims about our superiority somewhat hanging. Even if not at all sites or in such large degree, as a species they’re far closer than used to be believed to the ‘broad spectrum’ diet that supposedly underlay early H. sapiens’ success

But the question of whether Neanderthals simply scavenged it or could produce it is, perhaps surprisingly, still debated