Yet the Neanderthals were never some sort of highway service station en route to Real People. They were state-of-the-art humans, just of a different sort. Their fate was a tapestry woven from the lives of individual hybrid babies, entire assimilated groups, and in remoter corners of Eurasia, lonely dwindling lineages – endlings – who left nothing behind but DNA sifting slowly down into the dirt of a cave floor.
