ONCE upon a time, a race of cavemen ruled Europe and Asia, then mysteriously vanished, leaving little but bones and stone tools behind.

The history of the Neanderthals isn’t a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph.

Take their disappearance, which a team led by Finlayson has pinpointed to the rock of Gibraltar, between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal bones in Belgium in 1829, anthropologists have proposed any number of explanations …