This is the best summary I could come up with:

“It’s not a coincidence that several of them disappeared around the time that Homo sapiens started to spread out of Africa and around the rest of the world,” says Prof Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

There are ancient remains of early H sapiens in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, Omo Kibish in Ethiopia and Florisbad in South Africa, suggesting that our species arose from multiple sites.

“Hominin species were likely dying out all the time,” says Prof Eleanor Scerri, head of the human palaeosystems group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.

A 2022 study in Nature modelled the ancient climates and ecosystems in which H erectus, H heidelbergensis and Neanderthals lived and found that they lost significant portions of their environmental niches before disappearing.

Prof Axel Timmermann, a co-author of this study and director of the IBS Centre for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea, believes that H sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals, ultimately leading to the latter’s demise.

“Once you weave, you can make baskets or snare nets… A sewing needle gives you a better seal [on materials], so you have better-insulated tents and you can keep your babies warm, which is of course critical for infant survival.” Larger social networks would also have allowed H sapiens to share such innovations, he adds.

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