Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

Here's another study on the purported disappearance of the Neanderthals:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/18/end-of-neanderthals-linked-to-flip-of-earths-magnetic-poles-study-suggests

I still haven't seen anything that convinces me that there was any such disappearance beyond people mixing. My speculative hypothesis is roughly like this: Neanderthals were descendants of humans who migrated north of the Mediterranean a long time before anyone else. Europe was at that time still quite inhospitable--cold, not a lot of food to gather, and lots of large animals with whom humans would have been in conflict. By all accounts, except for Italy and the southern Iberian peninsula, the population in Europe always remained small. I think that populations would have been huge in Northern Africa for thousands of years, but when the climate there changed, bringing desertification, and the land could no longer support so many people, a period of migration started that brought increased numbers to Europe when little migration had occurred for a long time.

No doubt there would have been conflict between Neanderthals and the newcomers, but the much larger number of newcomers would simply have absorbed many Neanderthals through marriage and partnership. (I don't like it when people talk about 'interbreeding', although of course I have no idea what people's customs were at the time.) End of simple story. There's so much sensationalism still attached to Neanderthals based on the sensation of when fossils were first discovered, and I would assume that it was all a lot more boring.

Conflict--absolutely, yes, but not to 'extinction'. There simply were never that many of them and the old and new populations mixed.