In popular culture, they're often portrayed like members of a heavy-metal band: fur clad, shaggy haired, ape-like. But in most ways they were like you and me. They used fire and made tools, lived in social groups, and loved red meat.

So why did the Neanderthals disappear? The traditional wisdom has been that climate change did them in, possibly triggered by the super-eruption of the Campi Flegrei volcano, near Naples, which sent already-cold Ice Age temperatures plummeting.

In her new book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, Pat Shipman, retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, sets out a groundbreaking new argument.

Talking from her home in North Carolina, she explains how reading