Researchers from the University of Montreal in Canada and Cambridge in the UK have found a crucial difference that helped humans survive over Neanderthals over their ancestors over 40,000 years ago. The study suggests that humans may have survived due to groups of H. sapiens being more interconnected than Neanderthal ones. The most suitable areas for Neanderthal groups in Europe were found to be less well connected than habitats suited to Homo sapiens. This suggests that these small groups may have been more vulnerable to environmental changes. The findings were published in Quaternary Science.