Nowadays, all humans on Earth belong to the same group, to which we usually call "modern humans." But until about 30,000 years ago, other human groups existed in parallel to us. The most well-known are the Neanderthals. Neanderthals lived for tens of thousands of years in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. At the same time, modern humans evolved in Africa. The two groups met only when modern humans started to exit Africa and spread across other continents. The nature of the encounters between the two human groups is still a mystery, but the final outcome is well-known—we are still around, while Neanderthals went extinct long ago. The Neanderthals were overall very similar to us, but still exhibited some differences. For example, they had a lower and slightly elongated skull, a slightly bigger brain, a protruding face, bigger teeth, and wider bones, indicating that they were more robust than us. All of this can be seen in the many Neanderthal skeletons that were found along the years. In fact, many of what we know about them is related to their skeleton, as skeletal parts survive after death much better than other tissues.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00024