Brain Scans Challenge Assumptions About Neanderthal Intelligence

For over a century, Neanderthals have served as a mirror in which modern humans admired their own superiority — but new brain imaging research is shattering that reflection. Studies now show that Neanderthal brains matched our own in size, structure, and cognitive architecture, dismantling the 'caveman' myth that has long justified a tidy story of inevitable human triumph. Their extinction, it turns out, cannot be explained by intellectual inferiority alone, leaving science to confront a more unsettling truth: intelligence does not guarantee survival, and the forces that erase a species from t