The Neanderthals may have told each other stories about the life that their dead companion now enjoyed.
That takes Earth back to a time when Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
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This has certainly been an interesting year for the study of Neanderthals in science.
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Neanderthals abandoned the site during the coldest, glacial phases, when much of Britain was frozen.
Neanderthals, he said, may have been "different", but "their processes of thinking were obviously very similar".
Here the team looked to previous research which revealed that many Neanderthals were redheads.
That means the creature was contemporary with both Neanderthals and modern humans in the area.
This would have kept them much warmer than the wraps thought to have been worn by Neanderthals.
Hailing from Siberia's Denisova Cave, the girl was from an ancient human sub-species similar to the Neanderthals.
Though once thought to have been our ancestors, the Neanderthals are now considered an evolutionary dead end.
It was long known that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe, apparently for more than 10, 000 years.
Toward the end of their run Neanderthals were reaching adulthood three to five years sooner than we were.
The number of broken (and healed) fossilized bones that Neanderthals left behind attests to the batterings they took.
Most strikingly, genome analysis showed that anatomically modern humans mixed with the Neanderthals.
In any event the most interesting aspects of genetic engineering do not involve making humans or Neanderthals or mammoths.
No-one can say for sure what, if any, active role modern humans had in the decline of Europe's Neanderthals.
Studying teeth with state of the art technology is helping to unlock previously hidden secrets about the Neanderthals' lifestyle.
Hunts were particularly dangerous because Neanderthals never developed a spear they could throw.
But future research is also likely to focus on the 70-plus amino acid changes that distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals.
The six successful measurements did not involve Neanderthal bone but rather animal remains found in sediment layers associated with Neanderthals.
Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe somewhere around the 45, 000-year mark.
The Neanderthals who buried their companions with such care seem to have imagined that the visible, material world was not the only reality.
Europeans are not the descendants of Neanderthals - in spite of what you may think of the person in the office next door.
Their finding represents the first evidence that Neanderthals occupied more than simple caves during their existence in Eurasia 44, 000 years ago.
FORBES: Archaeologists Find Neanderthal Dwelling Made from Mammoth Bones
That it was division of labour which gave modern humanity its edge over the Neanderthals is not a completely new idea.
Forty thousand years ago, their long-lost Homo sapiens cousins from Africa began to show their high-browed, dark-skinned faces in Neanderthals' haunts.
The Neanderthals who built the structure also obviously lived in it for quite some time as 25 different hearths were found inside.
FORBES: Archaeologists Find Neanderthal Dwelling Made from Mammoth Bones
This is evident from DNA studies that prove Neanderthals made a small but significant contribution to the genetics of many modern humans.
For example, it now looks quite possible, based on genetic evidence derived from preserved Neanderthal DNA, that Neanderthals were capable of speech.
FORBES: Archaeologists Find Neanderthal Dwelling Made from Mammoth Bones
There is archaeological evidence, for example, that the Homo sapiens that coexisted with Neanderthals had needles that they used to make tailored clothing.
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