Eighty thousand years ago Europe belonged to a species of human so different from our own that scientists spent a century arguing whether to call them human at all. This film traces the rise and disappearance of the Neanderthals, using reconstructed skeletons, cave sites, and stone tool assemblages to piece together how they hunted, sheltered, and organized their lives across the ice age landscape. Reenactments show flint knapping and group hunts of large game, while researchers explain what fossil evidence reveals about Neanderthal anatomy, diet, and possible use of symbolic objects. The film weighs competing theories for their extinction around forty thousand years ago, from climate shifts to competition with arriving modern humans, without settling on a single verdict. What emerges is a portrait of a species built for survival in a brutal climate, closer to us than the old caveman stereotype suggests, and gone for reasons still debated by the people who study their bones.