Neanderthals survive

[Thucydides]

What would happen if homo sapiens had no reason to expand into Europe and did not cause Neanderthals to go extinct. This would have to be a completely hypothetical POD because no one knows why they went extinct in the first place. To help in this discussion here is a map of Neanderthal settlements.

 

[General Mung Beans]

What would happen if homo sapiens had no reason to expand into Europe and did not cause Neanderthals to go extinct. This would have to be a completely hypothetical POD because no one knows why they went extinct in the first place. To help in this discussion here is a map of Neanderthal settlements.

If the Neanderthals survive they probably won't develop civilization as fast as us so they'll be destroyed or subsumed by the Homo Sapiens like OTL.

 

[RMG]

IIRC, while neanderthal tool technology was (at least for much of their existence) every bit as complex and advanced as contemporary homo sapiens stone tools (and difficult enough to manufacture that they're likely to have needed some form of language to pass the knowledge of how to make them along), homo sapiens campsites were almost always filled with art, carvings, and decoration, while there are only a few, extremely debatable instances of what might have possibly been neanderthal ornamentation, but probably not.

Make of that what you will, I guess.

 

[WestVirginiaRebel]

If they stayed in Europe then Homo Sapien civilization might have developed in the Middle East, Africa and Asia and stayed there. The question is, what would a Neanderthal civilization look like? Robert Sawyer's The Neanderthal Parralax series is one of the more detailed looks at a Neanderthal civilization.

 

[rast]

Considering that early Homo Sapiens arrived at Australia some ten thousand years earlier than he entered Europe, there must have been something that kept these people from doing so.
Most probably not the Neanderthals, but the weather...
They came out of Africa as nice weather guys, and it took them some time to adopt to Europe's Ice Age climate. Probably they learned from the Neanderthals...
And then, when they proceded into Europe, they brought with them some nice African germs for which the Neanderthals had no anti-bodies. End of the Neanderthal story. No mass murder scenerio required. Just the poor big noses sneazing themselves to death.
The Neanderthals, on the other, seem to have suffered from the extreme cold as well, so their population base was already rather small when the newcomers arrived.

To change this: Neanderthals keep away from contact zone with Sapiens after some initial infections occur. (They of course do not identify Sapiens as perpetrator but think area is bad - this also leads to some immunisation in the Neanderthal population) Thus Sapiens doesn't learn to adopt to cold weather. Neanderthals in Europe recover and hold out until end of Ice Age. When Sapiens tries again, there's already a well developed Neanderthal hunter-gatherer society established, all hunting grounds taken, Sapiens turn east.

 

[mojojojo]

Neanderthals in Europe recover and hold out until end of Ice Age. When Sapiens tries again, there's already a well developed Neanderthal hunter-gatherer society established, all hunting grounds taken, Sapiens turn east.

So where do things go from there?