Neanderthal

Back in pre-historic times, say, 130,000-30,000 years ago, Europe was dominated not by quaint cafes and dainty bakeries, but by a group of not-quite humans called Neanderthals. In the form of a common insult, their legacy lives on today, and perhaps more accurately than we think: new research suggests that the Neanderthal's extinction was not due to climate change (as was previously argued) but rather to their inability to beat the competition, which came in the form of Cro-Magnon—the first anatomically modern human population.