vanished from the earth around 40,000 years ago after surviving for hundreds of thousands of years through much of the last ice age .
neanderthals , like the reconstruction above on display at the natural history museum in london , may have finally died out as they were unable to get as much energy from their food as modern humans who used fire .
they used computer model the amount of energy neanderthals would have been able to get from their food without cooking it compared to humans that