Did Homo Sapiens Really Outsmart Neanderthals? Different Skull Shapes Didn’t Necessarily Mean Unequal Brain Capacity, New Research Shows

But new research challenges that assumption. Mike Kemp / In Pictures / Getty Images Neanderthals lived for hundreds of thousands of years before mysteriously disappearing around 40,000 years ago—and scientists have long puzzled over what caused their extinction. One possible explanation is that, based on the size and shape of their skulls, Neanderthals may have been less intelligent than early modern humans. According to this theory, when Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and Asia, they used their superior smarts to outcompete Neanderthals.

But new research, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges this idea. The findings do not support the idea of Neanderthals having “significantly different brains and cognitive abilities compared to anatomically modern humans that existed at the time,” lead author Tom Schoenemann, an anthropologist at Indiana University, writes in an email to Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.

Neanderthals and humans have differently shaped skulls, which researchers have long assumed meant they also had different brains. However, these inferred differences were “not put into the context of modern human populational variation in brain anatomy, which is known to be substantial,” the researchers write in the paper.