A study released this week claims that Neanderthals were killed off 40,000 years ago because of interbreeding and assimilation with early ancestors.
Research on the subject appeared in the most recent edition of the journal PLOS ONE.
Neanderthals were actually much more sophisticated and advanced then most experts originally believed, according to the study. They "thrived" in a large swath of Asian and Europe between about 350,000 and 40,000 years ago.
They began to disappear once our ancestors, commonly referred to as "anatomically modern humans," crossed from Africa to Europe, according to a University of Colorado Boulder press release.
Previously, researchers tried claiming that the demise of the Neanderthals was because the newcomers were superior in a number of ways, like communicating, hunting, and adapting to different environments, according to the study.
CU-Boulder researcher Paola Villa and study co-author Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said that available evidence "does not support the opinion" that Neanderthals died out because they were less advanced than anatomically modern humans.
"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, according to the release. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true."
Villa and Roebroeks examined almost a dozen common explanations for Neanderthal extinction for their study, most of which rely on the belief that the Neanderthals were far inferior to anatomically modern humans.
Hypotheses include that Neanderthals were not able to use complex, symbolic communication, they had a "narrow diet" that put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they were less effective hunters, according to the release.
None of these theories were supported by available research however. For example, a number of archaeological sites in Europe showed that Neanderthals hunted as a group, and used the landscape to aid them.
Neanderthals were also capable of making effective tools and weapons, and ate plants and fish, meaning they had a number of options for meals, according to the study.
"Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors," Villa said. "It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari and conclude that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari."
Neanderthal DNA that was sequenced in 2010 showed evidence of interbreeding. Early humans and Neanderthals likely interbred in Europe and the Middle East somewhere around 50,000 years ago.
Researchers said that 1 percent to 4 percent of the DNA of people outside of Africa is inherited from Neanderthals.
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