Recent quotes:

Rockshelter Discoveries Show Neandertals Were a Lot like Us - Scientific American

In recent years, though, paleoanthropologists have recovered evidence of Neandertals behaving in ways no one would have predicted just a couple of decades ago. Bruce Hardy and his colleagues have found bits of ancient twisted thread at the site of Abris du Maras in France that show Neandertals had fiber technology. Marie Soressi and her collaborators discovered specialized bone tools called lissoirs, which are used for leatherworking, at Pech-de-l’Azé rockshelter in France. João Zilhão and his team have shown that Neandertals were eating mussels, crabs, sharks and seals, among other marine resources, at Figueira Brava in Portugal and other coastal sites. Elsewhere in Europe researchers have found indications that Neandertals exploited a wide variety of plant foods and even mushrooms.

Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France

Apart from a possible sporadic pulse recorded in Greece during the Middle Pleistocene, the first settlements of modern humans in Europe have been constrained to ~45,000 to 43,000 years ago. Here, we report hominin fossils from Grotte Mandrin in France that reveal the earliest known presence of modern humans in Europe between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago.