🦴 Neanderthal in Real Life What you’re seeing: A documentary-style reconstruction of a Neanderthal man in Ice Age Europe, imagined at human scale rather than as a museum stereotype. He is shown up close, in a quiet moment, to make the point that Neanderthals were not caricatures. They were real human relatives who lived, adapted, and struggled through extreme climates. What did new research find? A new ancient DNA study suggests that about 65,000 years ago, Neanderthals in Europe went through a major demographic collapse. Earlier mitochondrial lineages disappeared, and the later Neanderthals of Europe appear to have descended from a single surviving lineage that spread across the continent. Why does that matter? That surviving population seems to have had much lower genetic diversity than the Neanderthals who came before. Researchers suggest this may have made later Neanderthal populations more vulnerable to climate shocks and other disruptions before their eventual extinction arou...