He and Dr. Gaudzinski-Windheuser were part of a 2018

 He and Dr. Gaudzinski-Windheuser were part of a 2018 

investigation that proposed that the punctured bones of two male fallow deer salvaged at Neumark-Nord were the oldest example of hunting marks in history, and that Neanderthals used sophisticated close-range hunting techniques to capture their prey.

Neanderthals thrived for some 250,000 years throughout Europe and western Asia by successfully exploiting whatever environment they happened to live in. Scholars typically thought of these early settlers as akin to the Inuit of today — clusters of people living at the northernmost edge of human range.

“The new paper highlights the extent to which our view of them as cold-adapted, steppe-tundra, big-game hunters is skewed,” said João Zilhão, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Lisbon who was not involved in the study. “The truth is that they were no more representative of present-day humans as a whole than those Neanderthals were of Eurasian Neanderthals as a whole.”