Neanderthals managed to survive in Eurasia until around 40,000 years ago, but research indicates their population began collapsing nearly 70,000 years before their eventual extinction. This dramatic decline caused a sharp drop in both genetic and physical diversity, leaving the last generations of Neanderthals with strikingly uniform traits.

Understanding how prehistoric hominids became Neanderthalized is something of a conundrum for scientists. At present, all we know is that our extinct relatives emerged from a situation dubbed the "Muddle in the Middle", which refers to the complex and overlapping attributes shared by different human species during the Middle Pleistocene.

Out of this hodgepodge, a prototype known as the “pre-Neanderthals” eventually appeared, with the best skeletal

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