I always think along the lines of the direction of female pelvic bone development when I see different skulls. Walking upright, yet capability to deliver a baby with a big head creates a need for a balance between brain growth & the female pelvis. A shorter gestation period delivers a smaller headed baby, but increases infant mortality & may create a greater need for greater parental care, for a longer amount of time. Less "intelligent" survival strategies, such as ability to run or climb decreases some of the need for lengthy parental care. Gorillas have about a 9 months gestation, orangutans & chimpanzees approx 8-9 & baboons around 6.
From the article, the bone assemblage is carnivore-accumulated
Makes me wonder about ratios. I'd have to think Neandertal & Cro Magnon were equally tasty. Similar skill sets would show equal susceptibility to becoming lunch. Course, availability would also skew the ratio.
Neanderthals and modern humans not only coexisted for thousands of years long ago, as anthropologists have established, but now their little secret is out: they also cohabited.
At least that is the interpretation being made by paleontologists who have examined the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy discovered recently in a shallow grave in Portugal. Bred in the boy's bones seemed to be a genetic heritage part Neanderthal, part early modern Homo sapiens. He was a hybrid, they concluded, and the first strong physical evidence of interbreeding between the groups in Europe...
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neanderthal.html
Methinks it was the interbreeding that wiped out the Neandertal...hybrids are infertile, are they not?