Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Shrinking the universe’s 13.8 billion years to a single 12-month period puts the dinosaurs shockingly close to Christmas, while the earliest Homo sapiens arrive only a few minutes before New Year’s fireworks.

It’s more that Neanderthals and H. sapiens reflect two diverging pathways of being human, each with their own oddities.

Neanderthals rode earth’s climate rollercoaster for hundreds of thousands of years, coping with the extremes in weather that went with it