I believe they did.
if Neanderthal DNA confers no evolutionary advantages or disadvantages, then why didn’t Neanderthals survive through time to today?
They did. We call them demo-commies now-a-days.
I believe they did.
Well regardless of what your DNA is, if your whole tribe gets killed off by the opposition that DNA is a dead end.
I guess they were smarter, but more naturally peaceful, and the newcomers either wiped them out and/or raped them out of existence.
In contrast, genes associated with the neuropathways that guide speech were strongly selected against in modern humans, suggesting that the H. sapiens genes provided real advantages.
Most of the surviving Neanderthal DNA is inactive, which also suggests it may have been selected against or simply did nothing in H. sapiens cell metabolism but did not interfere with it.
As far as survival goes, the evidence so far suggests that early modern humans formed much larger social groups and communicated over much larger distances, giving those groups a big advantage over Neanderthals. They may not have been killed off, merely bred out of existence. If Neanderthals had survived in the Near East and learned agriculture, they might be wondering why H. sapiens did not survive.
I'm guessing they were just absorbed into the larger human population. Like they're hoping to do with whites.