Around 48,000 years ago, at the  edge of a forest clearing in   what's now southern Germany, an  apex predator stalked its prey.

The male cave lion was old, yet still fierce.

He’d used his powerful claws and fangs  to kill hundreds of times before,   over his many years at the very  top of the Eurasian food chain.

From reindeer, to bison, to young  woolly rhinos, and even cave bears - few   ice-age mammals had been safe from this  ferocious mega-carnivore in his prime.

But though he didn't know it, today, he  wasn't the predator, he was the prey.

And as he lay resting in the afternoon  sun, gathering strength for his next hunt,   another hungry carnivore slowly crept up  behind him and closed in for the kill.

A spear was suddenly thrust deep into the  left side of his body, piercing his lungs   and other vital organs, and killing him  before he had the chance to fight back.

After a lifetime as a hunter, he had  found himself hunted down by a species   that had risen to replace him as the new apex  predator of Eurasia: Homo neanderthalensis.

But just like that poor cave lion,   the Neandertals wouldn't be able to hold  on to the apex predator crown forever.

Eventually, they too would be dethroned.

And while climbing to the summit of the Eurasian  food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most   impressive evolutionary feats, in the end,  it may have actually been what doomed them.

Our view of the Neandertals has changed  a lot over the years.

For a long time,   they were portrayed as stupid cavemen  that were almost totally animalistic.

But over the last few decades, as more traces  of their existence have been found, we’ve come   to see them in a much more ’human’ light.

As we’ve explained before here on Eons,   it’s now thought that they were capable of  complex behaviors and culture, and constructing   things like tools and jewelry.

They may have even made art and   buried their dead.

But at the same time,   recent evidence has also shown that while  they weren’t just dumb brutes, they could   still be incredibly brutal when needed.

Because the fossil record shows that,   over their 300,000 years or so of evolving  alongside the ice-age beasts of Eurasia,   Neandertals became just, really, really,  ridiculously good at killing things.

We’ve found evidence of them actively  hunting species that likely had no   other predators as adults, things that under  normal circumstances just did not get hunted.

Take the straight tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon  antiquus, for example, which could reach twice   the size of today’s African elephants.

They were the largest land animals on   Earth across the entire Pleistocene epoch, but  even they weren't safe from the Neandertals.

In 2023, researchers published evidence from  a site in Germany dating to around 125,000   years ago, showing that Neandertal  communities actively hunted adult   Palaeoloxodon that weighed up to 13 tons each.

And the fossil evidence of hunting and butchering   those elephants at this particular site spanned  at least 2,000 years, practiced by dozens of   generations of Neandertals -- the only kind of  humans known to be living in Europe back then.

The researchers found similar cut mark  patterns on the bones of over 50 Palaeoloxodon   individuals over this time period.

And they could tell that this   wasn't a case of the Neandertals simply  scavenging ones that were already dead… Because there was a bias towards older males,  which would have been easier to hunt, seeing   as older males are usually solitary in elephant  societies rather than being protected by a herd.

And the fact that Neandertals  had a long-standing culture of   hunting giant elephants actually  tells us quite a lot about them.

Like, we previously thought that they only  lived in small groups and were highly mobile,   rarely staying put in any one place for long.

But sites like this that preserve so much   Neandertal activity over so many generations  show that they also clearly had favorite spots   to spend a lot of their time, maybe  even staying put there year-round.

And they must have sometimes  come together in large numbers,   because hunting down these enormous animals  would have required the combined skill,   coordination, and physical  strength of many individuals.

As would have butchering a carcass of that  size, which researchers estimated would   have taken multiple days even if dozens  of Neandertals were working together.

And occasionally teaming up in large  numbers would definitely pay off,   seeing as a single elephant could have  fed 100 Neandertals for nearly a month!

From the cut marks on the bones,  we even see evidence that they   were harvesting the fatty cushion pads  at the soles of the elephants’ feet!

And it would have been no mean  feat getting all that feet meat…   Now, you can learn a lot about a species  from the range of animals it hunted.

And we have evidence of Neandertals hunting  everything from Paleoloxodon and mammoths,   to bison, to rhinos, to cave bears, right down  the food chain to crabs and roosting cave birds.

So the fact that Neandertals in  different places at different   times hunted basically everything that  moved gives us a valuable insight into   the ecological niche that they  filled in their environment.

And that niche was…meat-hungry apex predator.

Sure, they would have foraged for plant foods  too, but studies of the isotopes in their bones,   which preserve information about their  diets, have generally confirmed that the   vast majority of their food came from  meat, primarily from big herbivores.

And they had some key traits that may have made  them a good fit for this particular niche.

For one, they had stocky and muscular  bodies, which means that the average   Neandertal was probably pretty strong,  helpful for overpowering prey.

Plus, we know that with bodies that  heavily built, they must have needed   to consume a few hundred more calories  every day than the average Homo sapiens.

Combined with their intelligence, teamwork, and  tool use, these traits positioned them to become   some of the most impressive predators  that Pleistocene Eurasia had ever seen.

They even preyed on other apex predators,   like that 48,000 year old cave  lion we mentioned earlier.

A re-analysis of its skeleton, which researchers  published in 2023, revealed the spear puncture   wound and the cut marks left behind after  the Neandertals killed and butchered it.

Much like Paleoloxodon, this was yet  another species that had basically   no other known predators until the  Neandertals showed up in Eurasia.

Clearly we didn't just underestimate the   Neandertals’ capacity for  emotion, reason, and art… We also underestimated just how skilled  at hunting our apex predator cousins   had become after hundreds of thousands of years  of rising to the top of the Eurasian food chain.

Which leads us to the inevitable question: if  they were such an ecological success story,   why’d they vanish entirely,  around 40,000 years ago?

Well, the truth is, we just don't know  for sure.

But we do know that their   extinction occurred not long after another  predator emerged on the scene in Eurasia,   a little over 50,000 years ago - Homo sapiens.

And perhaps this town simply wasn't  big enough for the both of us.

See, one hypothesis for the demise of the  Neandertals is conflict with Homo sapiens.

And that could have taken the  form of either direct conflict,   or ecological conflict in which we pushed  them out of their top spot on the food chain,   driving them to extinction through competition.

And this idea is definitely plausible, because  we know that our hunting style was distinct   from theirs, and it may have given us  a competitive advantage as predators.

For example, Neandertals are thought  to have mostly ambush hunters,   using spears and clubs to injure  and kill their prey up close.

In contrast, us Homo sapiens, with our  more slender build, were especially   good at persistence hunting - chasing down  prey over long distances to tire them out,   and we used projectile weapons like bows and  arrows to injure and kill from a distance.

In fact, the very earliest Homo sapiens  remains currently known in Europe,   from a cave in France dated to around  54,000 years ago and published in 2022,   come complete with a bunch of stone arrowheads.

So even during our earliest  incursions into Neandertal territory,   we had already developed some form of archery.

Other than occasionally lobbing  their spears at their targets though,   Neandertals aren’t thought to have  used any projectile weapons at all.

And as far as we can tell, they don't seem   to have adopted the technology  after encountering us, either.

Plus, we likely had a broader  dietary range than Neandertals,   as well as lower caloric needs in general.

So our more effective hunting strategies,  combined with our more versatile diets,   may have simply helped us outcompete  them after arriving on the scene.

But there’s another possibility, too.

Perhaps conflict and/or competition with us  wasn't the main driving force behind their   extinction – perhaps it was wider changes in  the late Pleistocene climate and environment,   which we also know occurred around that time.

See, between 40,000 and 44,000 years ago, Europe  underwent a series of rapid cooling periods,   which would have replaced forests with  grasslands in many parts of the continent.

And some researchers have argued for a causal link   between these sudden environmental shifts and  the extinction of the Neandertals as a whole,   whose youngest known remains  also date to around this time.

Even in this scenario,   their hard-won apex predator status  may have still been what doomed them… Because, from an ecological perspective, the top  of the food chain is a…pretty wobbly place to sit.

When environmental conditions change,   apex predators are often among  the most vulnerable to extinction.

They rely on all the elements of the food chain   below them to be functioning  well enough to support them.

It’s something we see today with  modern predators like big cats.

For populations to thrive, they require  large habitats and large numbers of prey.

When they begin to lose significant amounts  of either, their numbers can rapidly crash.

And this same process may have played out  with the Neandertals, as their prey-rich,   forested hunting spots were replaced by more  sparsely-populated open grasslands, instead.

So while the Neandertals’ rise to apex predator  status was a huge evolutionary success story,   it may have also been what doomed them.

Either by setting them up to eventually directly  compete with us for the same ecological niche,   or simply by occupying an  especially precarious spot   in the food chain - a spot that made them  highly vulnerable to environmental shocks.

We may never know the full  story of their demise for sure.

But the story of the Neandertals in  their prime is recorded in the broken   and butchered bones of their prey that litter  the Pleistocene fossil record of Eurasia… Bones that tell the tale of a time when, in a  world full of colossal elephants and giant lions,