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Neanderthal Man was a species (or subspecies, see below) of genus Homo who inhabited Europe and parts of what is now western Asia during the last ice age. They seem to have been well adapted to extreme cold, but appear to have had difficulty adapting to climatic changes near the end of the ice age. They were named after the Neander valley in Germany, where their fossil remains were first found. Their characteristic style of stone tools is called the Mousterian Culture, after another prominent archaeological site.

Neanderthals apparently co-existed with anatomically modern man beginning some 100,000 years ago. However, about 45,000 years ago, at about the time that stoneworking techiques similar to those of Cro-Magnon man appeared in Europe, Neanderthals began to be displaced. Despite this, populations of Neanderthals held on for thousands of years in regional pockets such as modern-day Croatia and the Iberian and Crimean peninsulars. Cro-Magnon are considered by most authorities to have been behaviorally modern Homo Sapiens.

There is considerable debate surrounding the question as to whether Cro-Magnon man accelerated the demise of Neanderthal, but the timing suggests that the developing behavior patterns of Cro-Magnon may have had considerable impact on the process.

Popular literature has tended to greatly exaggerate the ape-like gait and related characteristics of the Neanderthals. It has been found that some of the earliest specimens found in fact suffered from severe arthritis. The Neanderthals were fully bipedal and had a slightly larger average brain capacity than that of a typical modern-human (though brain structure was organised somewhat differently).

Both the Neanderthal's place in the human family tree and their relation to modern Europeans has been hotly debated ever since their discovery. They have been classified as a separate species (Homo neanderthalensis) and as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) as the fashion in paleo-anthropological circles came and went. The consensus has been, based on ongoing DNA research, that they were a separate branch of the genus Homo, and that modern humans are not descended from them. But recent genetic research has pointed toward the probability that the gene responsible for red-hair and freckles in modern Europeans infact had Neanderthal origins.