The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived

What’s Happening

Here’s the thing: Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall Columnist and Humans The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall By Michael Marshall 13 January 2026 Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email Neanderthals often found refuge in caves GREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY This is an extract from Our Human Story, our about the revolution in archaeology.

To receive it in your inbox every month . It’s early January and south-west Britain is painfully cold. (it feels like chaos)

Not that cold, obviously: my friends in Canada and Scandinavia are laughing at my pitiful attempts to deal with near-freezing conditions.

The Details

But it’s cold enough that I need to wrap up warmly or the chill seeps into my bones. Which brings me to the Neanderthals, our long-extinct cousins, who we have tended to imagine living in frigid environments.

A lot of our imagery of the Neanderthals is decidedly Siberian: frozen tundra, driving winds, woolly mammoths plodding through the snow. They have often been described as cold-adapted hominins.

Why This Matters

How a surge in ancient plagues 5000 years ago shaped humanity Now, if you’ve been paying close attention to New Scientist over the past couple of months, you might remember a hint that that isn’t quite right. In November, we published a story called “ Neanderthals’ hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates ”. In it, Chris Simms reported on the first study of a well-preserved nasal cavity, which belonged to a Neanderthal dubbed Altamura Man who lived in what is now Italy.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

It had before been reported that Neanderthal nasal cavities contained specialised bony structures that helped them to warm up the air they had just breathed in. But these were not present in this spectacular specimen, suggesting they weren’t a standard Neanderthal feature.

How do you feel about this development?