Having disappeared more than 40,000 years ago, Neanderthal man left behind many mysteries that continue to puzzle researchers.
For some 300,000 years, Neanderthals populated a large part of the Eurasian continent, from the Atlantic to Siberia. Mostly present in what is now northwestern Europe, these nomadic hunter-gatherers, who mastered the art of flint knapping, which they used to make formidable tools and weapons, lived in inhospitable environments, facing temperatures of around -20°C during the ice ages.
Organized into small groups of twenty to thirty individuals, they followed the movements of game throughout the seasons: fallow deer, red deer, horses, but also aurochs, mammoths, and rhinoceroses. Certainly practicing exchanges of women between groups – a guarantee of the genetic survival of each clan, they were able to adapt to climatic changes over a vast territory before disappearing 42,000 years ago, leaving Homo sapiens to conquer the entire planet.