What happened to the Neanderthals?
From a combination of old and new evidence, it appears that at last we have a satisfactory answer to the age-old question of 'What Happened to the Neanderthals?'. If the current reasoning is correct, their descendants are still with us, and we call them the Basques.
Location: The 'home country' of the Neanderthals is well known to have been western Europe. One source says that they "dominated this area for at least a quarter of a million years". Many of the best Neanderthal specimens have originated from the Iberian Peninsular. The Basque Country, lying on the western side of the Pyrenees and on the border between Spain and France, fits in neatly with this location.
Basque absolutely cannot be shown to be related to any other language at all [3].
Neanderthal people would have had difficulty in pronouncing the vowel 'ee'. This vowel is missing from normal Basque pronunciation
clipped from: www.aoi.com.au