New Research

Did Homo Sapiens Really Outsmart Neanderthals? Different Skull Shapes Didn’t Necessarily Mean Unequal Brain Capacity, New Research Shows

A study from U.S. and Chinese researchers suggests Neanderthals and early modern humans probably had similar cognitive abilities

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

May 13, 2026 5:29 p.m.

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Neanderthals lived for hundreds of thousands of years before mysteriously disappearing around 40,000 years ago—and scientists have long puzzled over what caused their extinction. One possible explanation is that, based on the size and shape of their skulls, Neanderthals may have been less intelligent than early modern humans. According to this theory, when Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and Asia, they used their superior smarts to outcompete Neanderthals.

But new research, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges this idea. The findings do not support the idea of Neanderthals having “significantly different brains and cognitive abilities compared to anatomically modern humans that existed at the time,” lead author Tom Schoenemann, an anthropologist at Indiana University, writes in an email to Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.

Neanderthals and humans have differently shaped skulls, which researchers have long assumed meant they also had different brains. However, these inferred differences were “not put into the context of modern human populational variation in brain anatomy, which is known to be substantial,” the researchers write in the paper.

To contextualize this variation, scientists from universities in China and in the United States compared the brains of ethnic Han Chinese individuals and Americans with European ancestry. In 9 of the 13 brain regions they investigated, the researchers found larger differences between the modern Han Chinese and American individuals than between Neanderthals and the early modern humans who lived alongside them.

“This suggests that cognitive differences between Neanderthals and [anatomically modern H. sapiens] would have comfortably fit within the range found among modern human populations—which are generally not considered evolutionarily significant,” the researchers write in the paper. “This undermines the suggestion that Neanderthal replacement occurred because of cognitive limitations.”

Based on their skulls alone, Neanderthals and early modern humans may have differed in cognitive abilities such as attention, working memory and language. However, the researchers point out that the relationship between brain anatomy and cognitive ability is murky at best. And even if the differences in brain anatomy did accurately correspond with differences in cognition, the variation between Neanderthals and early modern humans would have been very small, according to the researchers.

“It seems likely that any average cognitive differences that existed would have been very subtle, if detectable at all,” says Schoenemann in a statement.

Rather than innate differences in cognitive ability, the researchers believe Neanderthals instead died out for other reasons. The evidence, they write in the paper, “strongly points to demography and genetic swamping—possibly as a result of some kinds of cultural differences.” In other words, once Neanderthals and H. sapiens began interbreeding, the genes of early modern humans gradually replaced Neanderthal genes, until Neanderthals were completely genetically absorbed and no longer remained a distinct species. Other possible explanations for their demise include isolation and a lack of genetic diversity, which may have made Neanderthals more vulnerable to threats like a changing climate or competition from H. sapiens.

The idea that Neanderthals may have been just as smart as early modern humans doesn’t come as a major surprise. For years, archaeologists have been finding signs of their intelligence—from examples of artistic expression to the development and use of a sophisticated “fat factory.” A new study, published last month, also suggests they had the genetic hardware for complex language.

Increasingly, the evidence suggests Neanderthals were “not dumb brutes,” as they have long been depicted in popular culture, John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told National Geographic’s Michael Greshko in 2018. Instead, he added, they were “recognizably human.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.