🦴 Neanderthals in Real Life | 50,000 years ago What you’re seeing: A Neanderthal band in Ice Age France, about 50,000 years ago. Then their encounters with modern humans, and what DNA later revealed. Who were the Neanderthals? Another kind of human, Homo neanderthalensis. Shorter and stockier than us, with heavy brows and brains as large as ours. They hunted reindeer, bison and red deer, used stone-tipped spears and fire, and evidence suggests they sometimes cared for severely injured members and buried their dead. The clothing and foot wraps shown here are inferred. None survive. Where did they come from? Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia after their lineage separated from the ancestors of modern humans. DNA from 430,000-year-old fossils at Sima de los Huesos shows they were closer to Neanderthals than to Denisovans. When did they live? Neanderthals lived across Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. These scenes take place about 50,000 years ago, about 10,000 years before they...