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AP) -- Neanderthals were not the ham-fisted cavemen often portrayed in cartoons, but instead had at least as much dexterity as modern humans, computer modeling of ancient hand bones shows.
The modeling suggests that the disappearance of Neanderthals cannot be attributed solely to a physical inability to make tools as successfully as their modern human cousins, researchers said.
Instead, the reason for the Neanderthals' demise seems to be more complex, said Wesley Niewoehner, an anthropologist at California State University-San Bernadino who developed the computer model. Results of his comparisons appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Neanderthals had to compete for food and territory with fast-spreading modern humans, who are believed to have been more adept at finding resources and cooperating strategically. Other factors such as changing climates also may have played a role.
There have also been questions about their ability to make tools.
"If you could write off Neanderthals as inferior, unable to make precision grips and therefore unable to make precision tools, it would be easier to explain what happened to them," Niewoehner said.
Neanderthal man, one of a number of types of early man that predated modern humans, evolved in Europe and eventually covered an area ranging from Spain to southern Russia and western Asia. The oldest fossils attributed to Neanderthals are more than 350,000 years old.
They are believed to have vanished about 10,000 to 15,000 years after modern man emerged from Africa and the Far East about 45,000 years ago.
The computer modeling on the Neanderthal hand was conducted with epoxy casts of hand bones found in 1909 in La Ferrassie, France. The casts of the thumb and index finger bones were scanned to produce three-dimensional models, which were used to determine the range of motion possible with the bone structure.
Scientists already knew Neanderthal man could make tools and must have had good dexterity. The computer model confirms that "the Neanderthal hand may have looked a bit different, but was not functionally inferior," said Ian Tattersall, curator of the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Neanderthal hands were more heavily muscled than modern human hands, with broad finger tips.
University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz went one step further than Niewoehner, saying Neanderthal man's grasp may have been superior to the grip of modern human hands.
The popularized idea of Neanderthal man as caveman is wrong, said Schwartz, who noted that the Neanderthal brain was as big as modern man's, if not bigger.
"People tend to think of Neanderthals as less competent," Schwartz said. "This really illustrates once again that Neanderthals were very unique... rather than being more primitive."
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