This week’s animation features three recent articles from Nature (volume 479, pages 483 – 485, pages 521 – 524, pages 525-529), which shifted the documented arrival time of modern humans in Europe by a few thousand years to an earlier time point. These findings have implications for the amount of time modern humans and neanderthals have spent together and for the cultural achievements of the neanderthals. Some of their assumed achievements seem to have been caused by modern humans instead.