Next thing you know, they’re going to be showing up in our back yards. But Past Horizons says the last Neanderthals were about 8,000 years younger than we thought:
Remains found near the Arctic Circle in May 2011 are characteristic of the Mousterian culture and have recently been dated at over 28,500 years old, which is more than 8,000 years after Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared.
The Ural Mountains site “may be one of the last refuges of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting,” said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France’s Université de Toulouse le Mirail.
Or, the researchers are wondering, did a group of Homo sapiens inherit Neanderthal culture directly? What does *that* mean for how they got along… and what happened to Homo neanderthalensis in the end?
[via]