Pure speculation but it would be interesting if that was related to the apparent harshness and difficulty of life at the time. Perhaps it was something selected for survival.
It sounds like they had to endure some damage:
I like the wikipedia quote: ' It has been remarked that Neanderthals showed a frequency of such injuries comparable to that of modern rodeo professionals, showing frequent contact with large, combative mammals. The pattern of fractures, along with the absence of throwing weapons, suggests that they may have hunted by leaping onto their prey and stabbing or even wrestling it to the ground.'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030544...
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They also never completely vanished; I have a number Neanderthal-specific alleles (more than most), as have pretty much all people of not exclusively subsaharan descent, and these alleles seem to have some pretty profound effects, some of them quite negative. That may be because these alleles evolved to work in concert with others that we haven't inherited, or for some other reason, but that would be quite valuable knowledge for a huge lot of people.
Besides, they're also a fascinating part of our collective history. They apparently had a unique and rich culture of their own; they are thought to have produced works of art before we even arrived in Europe[0] and they built pretty big structures out of stalagmites that appear to have no obvious practical purpose, in Bruniquel cave[1], about 176,000 years ago; by comparison, our ancestors seem to have started doing comparable things only ~60-50ka ago.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02357-8 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruniquel_Cave
Can you elaborate? What kind of effects?
Apparently they[we] did survive.
Also, long term survival of a species has a lot more to do with luck than you'd think. e.g If cooling temperatures killed off their primary food source and forced them to migrate into human controlled territory where they didn't have experience, they'd be at a disadvantage. But if they lived in a temperature warming era, we may be having the opposite conversation right now. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a good summary of this hypothesis.
According to wikipedia Homo Sapiens have been around for 300 to 400 thousand years, while Neanderthals existed for 315 thousand to more than 800 thousand years.
In regards to Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals you just have to wait until Homo Sapiens goes extinct or has been around for a number of years that exceeds that of Neanderthals. Then you can conclude which species was better at surviving.
I could equally well state that humans are going to last 100 million years. Mackrel shark did, and it doesn't even possess any advanced technology.
Also, I don't agree that a conjecture has to be experimentally proven during your personal lifetime in oder to be falsifiable. E.g. that would make gravity waves unfalsifiable, since they were predicted by Einstein in 1916 but weren't observed until 2016; 61 years after his death.
Einstein's theories were falsifiable in multiple ways, with earliest confirming experiments in 1920s. Still, 61 years is within a lifetime. 10k years requires a time machine and makes your proposition pointless. As good as waiting for second coming to see if Bible's right.
> They didn't survive, so not sure what that says.
It says nothing because we cannot yet conclude that Homo Sapiens will survive for longer.
> Still, 61 years is within a lifetime. 10k years requires a time machine and makes your proposition pointless.
Interesting! So when does an experiment become pointless? When it takes a 100 years to prove? 200 years? 500 years? 1000 years?
> As good as waiting for second coming to see if Bible's right.
That's not the same. The second coming might never happen, Homo Sapiens will go extinct. In a million years, you can conclude which species survived the longest, but you'd probably still by waiting for the second coming.