Southwest Asian Neanderthals were Neanderthals who lived in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran - the southernmost expanse of the known Neanderthal range. Although their arrival in Asia is not well-dated, early Neanderthals occupied the region apparently until about 100,000 years ago. At this time, Homo sapiens immigrants seem to have replaced them in one of the first anatomically-modern expansions out of Africa. In their turn, starting around 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals seem to have returned and replaced Homo sapiens in Southwest Asia. They inhabited the region until about 55,000 years ago.^[1]

In Southwest Asia Neanderthals have left well-preserved skeletal remains in present-day Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. Remains in Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran are fragmentary. No Neanderthal skeletal remains have ever been found to the south of Jerusalem, and although there are Middle Palaeolithic Levallois points in Jordan and in the Arabian peninsula, it is unclear whether these were made by Neanderthals or by anatomically modern humans.^[1] Neanderthals living further to the east, such as those found in present-day Uzbekistan^[2][3] and Asian Russia^[4][5] are known as Central and North Asian Neanderthals.

As of 2013^[update], although many more Neanderthal remains have been discovered in Southwest Asia than in North Asia, where genetic studies have succeeded,^[6] no attempt at extracting DNA from Southwest Asian Neanderthals has ever been successful.^[7]

As the Levant is the landbridge to Eurasia, Dmanisi remains in Georgia from 1.81 Ma suggest that hominins passed through the Levant some time before this (unless they crossed the Bab el-Mandeb strait into Arabia). The oldest known hominin specimen from the Levant, and from all the Middle East, is the Zuttiyeh skull, found by Francis Turville-Petre near the Sea of Galilee in 1927. It has not been dated, but lithic industries suggest it dates from 350-250 ka (Bar-Yosef 1992).^[8] Though it has some modern characteristics, it has been classified as a specimen of Homo heidelbergensis.

Other known hominin fossils in Southwest Asia older than 100 ka include Shanidar 2 and 4, as well as Tabun C1. All three have at one point been classified as Neanderthals, although the latter two are now usually called pre-Neanderthals. In part because none are well-dated these attributions have all been challenged.

It is believed that anatomically modern humans first entered the Levant by 130 – 100 ka (Grün 2005)^[9] from Africa during the Last Interglacial, a hot, parched, period in Africa (Scholz et al. 2007).

Potential causes for the initial extinction of modern humans from the Levant and subsequent replacement by Neanderthals around 80 ka include a short-term extreme environmental change in the Levant and environmental changes in the regions neighbouring the Levant. The only long-term environmental change that has been found in the Levant at this period is an increase in rainfall (Hallin et al. 2012),^[11] and some moderate cooling of the region (Bar-Yosef 1992,^[8] Harrison and Bates 1991),^[12] which would not predict a hominin extinction (Hallin et al. 2012).^[11] Hence, a short-lived intense environmental change (such as a volcanic winter of 6 to 1000 years caused by the Toba supereruption, Rampino and Self 1992)^[13] might have caused modern human extinction, especially if the modern human Levantine population was low (Shea 2008).^[14] In this case, Neanderthals could have moved in during or after the modern human evacuation of the region.

Unless modern humans started expanding into Eurasia through Arabia (where stone tools but very few human bones have been found), the Levant was most likely the first place Neanderthals lost ground to expanding modern humans.

It is unclear why Neanderthals abandoned the Levant or lost it to modern humans. Shea (2008)^[14] has argued that Neanderthals were climatically forced out of the region (as modern humans probably were about 75,000 years ago). This is contested. Belmaker et al. (2011)^[16] have found that the proportions of microfaunal bones in the Levant between 70 and 55 kya seem stable, despite the fact that small fauna are sensitive to slight changes in temperature or humidity. There would be hence little reason to believe in a slow deterioration of the Neanderthal habitat driving them out by 45 kya. It is possible that climate change drove Neanderthals to extinction quickly some time after 55,000 BP, but Hallin et al. (2012)^[11] found strong consistency through time in the δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O values in the teeth of both goats and gazelles, suggesting that the climate was stable in the Levant at this crucial period when Middle Palaeolithic technologies of Neanderthals and early modern humans were replaced by Upper Palaeolithic technology of later modern humans.

Although the environment at this period in the Levant seems to have been stable, Shea (2008)^[14] suggested that a rapidly changing environment at the border between the Levant and the Sinai could have stimulated the development of the first Upper Palaeolithic technologies. In this scenario, modern humans would only have been able to displace Neanderthals once they had developed this technology. The advanced tools found in Europe in the millennia thereafter would have developed there and then.

It is believed that Neanderthals and modern humans in the Levant had different resource gathering behaviours. Lieberman and Shea (1994)^[17] analysed their lithic hunting technologies and found their differences to suggest Neanderthals hunted more frequently than modern humans. They argue that Neanderthals would have used their intensive hunting strategy to cope with a biodepleted environment, much like the Inuit of the 20th century used to depend largely on hunting. Henry et al. (2017)^[18] found that in the Levant the site exploitation territory of Neanderthals was narrow, as they limited themselves to rugged woodlands, while modern humans of the Upper Palaeolithic would have been generalists with large exploitation territories in both the rugged woodlands and levelled steppe landscapes.

Although it does seem as if the environment favoured the initial success and eventual demise of Neanderthals, it is still unclear whether differences in their resource gathering strategies reflect differences in the environment, in anatomy, or in intelligence.

The remains of more than 70 Southwest Asian Neanderthals have been found. Sites are sorted west to east, first by country (westernmost site) then within countries. Important remains are in bold.