‘where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?’
The current theory seems to be that they descended from Heidelberg Man, which arose in Africa more than half a million years before Homo Sapiens, and who had spread out of Africa at, very roughly, 500 thousand B.C.
I guess it was inevitable that a guy named Heidelberg would end up in Europe.
So they were a distinctly separate group and migration way previous to “humans”. Wow, we are getting down to counting pretty fine threads. I was always led to believe that they wre just an earlier form of modern man~~ Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and modern man....
Very obviously the timing of all of this movement into and out of Africa is related to what the ice ages were doing at the time. There are about half a dozen of them that definitely affected Europe and Asia over that period, but there are a full 21 cycles (according to the Antarctic ice cores), and they influenced our development as well.