One thing that would help to resolve matters would be evidence of interbreeding, but that is not at all easy to prove, or disprove, from fossils.
This refers to interbreeding between Neanderthal and sapiens. Genome sequencing is a better way to address the question, and "Neanderthals are known to contribute up to 1-4% of the genomes of non-African modern humans, depending on what region of the word your ancestors come from, and modern humans who lived about 40,000 years ago have been found to have up to 6-9% Neanderthal DNA (Fu et al., 2015)."https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals
