The first of our cousin species, the Neanderthals, were discovered in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856, three years before Charles Darwin published his revolutionary book, “On the Origins of Species.”

Neanderthals were a thick-boned and heavily muscled species with prominent boney orbital brows.

For those features, they were roundly considered to be dimwitted and certainly no match for modern humans. Discoveries in the late 1900s revealed a different picture.

Not only did Neanderthals leave numerous examples of hand prints and less often examples of figurative art, on the walls of caves they inhabited, but they were the first species to create flutes.

All this occurred many thousands of years before modern humans in western Europe. They also created jewelry and at least one example of what looks like a temple of sorts inside a cave dated over 100,000 years ago.

Based on recent evidence gleaned from widely scattered cave sites in Siberia, Neanderthals were thought to live in small groups of 10 or fewer.

If so, that may have been their undoing and the explanation for their extinction 30,000 years ago. Living in small groups reduces genetic diversity and favours the accumulation of faulty genes made worse by too few fathering males. That’s where this story comes in.

Recent findings in a coal mining area in Germany revealed a startling example of butchery of giant elephants on a grand scale.

Neanderthals had gathered in the area to slaughter these giants. Most of the butchered elephants were male, who like their modern-day descendants and mammoths, tended to forage alone, unlike females and their progeny.

These now-extinct giant elephants were twice the height of modern-day African elephants and possessed straight tusks (Paleoloxodon antiquus).

Estimates suggest that harvesting the flesh of one of those giant elephants would yield as much as four tons of meat, enough perhaps, to feed 100 Neanderthals for a month.

But bringing down such massive elephants with axes and spears would have required the co-operation of many, extensive planning, great skill – and courage.

The level of co-operation required strongly suggests that killing such massive animals would mean a large group of Neanderthals worked together, which suggests everyone in the group knew each other well.

My guess is that overnight group size was 10 or possibly 20 and that nearby groups banded together for major hunts such as this one.

Hunting and killing large animals (megafauna) was common with modern humans.

The collective evidence on almost every continent modern humans reached is that within a few thousand years of the arrival of humans most of the megafauna (such as woolly mammoths) had disappeared in Eurasia and eventually the Americas.

Unfavourable climate change might have been a factor, too, but in the case of these Neanderthals, the climate was favourable because the Earth was in a warming interglacial period with plenty of food.

In modern times, killing elephants and other large animals as trophies or, in the case of elephants, for their tusks has had a profound effect not only on herd size but an increase in the proportion without tusks because the gene that leads to tuskless elephants is favoured.

What a waste.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.