Simulations suggest Neanderthals and modern humans rarely met on Iberian Peninsula

Fifty thousand years ago, two branches of humanity briefly shared the same peninsula at the edge of the known world — one ancient and fading, one newly arrived and spreading. Researchers at the University of Cologne have now built a computational model to ask whether they ever truly met, finding that such an encounter, while not impossible, was constrained by climate, geography, and the cruel arithmetic of small populations. The question of what passed between Neanderthals and modern humans on the Iberian Peninsula remains open, but science is learning to ask it with greater precision.