The next time you consider defaming someone by labeling him or her a Neanderthal, you might want to choose different terminology, based on findings by a researcher at the University of Colorado and his colleague.

An extensive review of recent Neanderthal research by CU's Paola Villa and co-author Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, argues that the available evidence does not support a long-held perception by many that Neanderthals were less advanced than anatomically modern humans, or that their supposed inferiority contributed to their demise.

Neanderthals thrived in a large area across Europe and Asia between about 350,000 and 40,000 years ago and vanished after our ancestors, a group referred to as "anatomically modern humans," entered Europe from Africa.

"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," Villa, a curator at the CU Museum of Natural History, said in a news release. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true."

The paper by Villa and Roebroeks was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Villa and Roebroeks studied nearly a dozen common explanations for the Neanderthals' extinction, which relied largely on the notion that the Neanderthals were inferior to anatomically modern humans.

They found that none of the hypotheses examined was supported by the available research. For example, evidence from multiple archaeological sites in Europe suggests that Neanderthals hunted as a group, even exploiting their landscape as an ally.

This included evidence that Neanderthals likely herded hundreds of bison to their death by steering them into a sinkhole in southwestern France. At a site used by Neanderthals in the Channel Islands, fossilized remains of 18 mammoths and five woolly rhinoceroses were found at the bottom of a ravine. This suggested to the researchers that Neanderthals were capable of both advance planning and group communication.

Villa and Roebroeks say that the past misrepresentation of Neanderthals' cognitive ability could be tied to researchers' tendency to compare Neanderthals, who lived in the Middle Paleolithic era, to modern humans living during the more recent Upper Paleolithic period, a time of great technological advancements.