Extremely advanced for his time

Neanderthals coexisted with early modern humans in Europe for up to 5,400 years, according to researchers from Oxford university who used new techniques to pinpoint when the early cousins of Homo sapiens became extinct.

Scientists used radiocarbon dating evidence for 200 bone, charcoal and shell samples from 40 European archaeological sites to show that the two human groups overlapped for a significant period of time.

They also concluded that Neanderthals disappeared gradually at different times in different locations, rather than undergoing rapid extinction.

It was already known that there was some contact and interbreeding between the two groups because research has shown that about 1.5-2.1 per cent of the DNA of modern non-African humans originates from Neanderthals.

However, the Oxford research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday provides the most detailed timeline so far of how this process unfolded.

Neanderthals – a human subspecies related to, but genetically different from Homo sapiens – had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years when the first modern humans migrated out of Africa.

It is thought they died out because they […]