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What's the difference between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens?
Neanderthals are our closest relatives who went extinct around 40,000 years ago. Here's how they differed to us.
Neanderthals were modern humans' closest relatives, and the two types of humans lived in many of the same habitats and interbred multiple times before our cousins died out around 40,000 years ago, which is why some Neanderthal DNA still lives in most Eurasians today.
Yet despite this closeness, Neanderthals' (Homo neanderthalensis) and Homo sapiens' lineages diverged sometime between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago, and the two species differed in many ways.
Here are some of the key ways our closest human relatives were different from us.
Related: Neanderthal woman's face brought to life in stunning reconstruction
Facial features
If you were traveling on the subway in New York and met a Neanderthal, you'd probably recognize them immediately, Shara Bailey, a professor of biological anthropology at New York University, told Live Science. That's because of their distinctive facial features.
At first glance, you'd likely notice they have a sloping forehead with very big, arched brow ridges, she said. Their nose would be wider and more prominent than those of modern humans, and their skull would be a little bit more elongated, she added.
When seen from the side, Neanderthals also had noticeably smaller chins, and their front teeth were bigger compared with our teeth, Chris Stringer, a research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science.
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Although Neanderthals had similar size brains to H. sapiens, their skull shape differed from ours.
"Our skulls tend to be high and rounded, globular in terms of the shape of the braincase, whereas Neanderthal skulls, like those of most other early humans, are long and low," Stringer said.
Neanderthal …