Bare, empty desert stretching around the ruin: the Neanderthals last stand

Around 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens took over most of Europe, and drove out Neanderthals out of everywhere except the Iberian peninsula in Spain. A new paper by Sepulchre et al shows that the climatic changes caused major desertification of the peninsula, and led to modern humans avoiding the region, allowing the poor old Neanderthals to eke out a few more centuries