Worldwide research trends on Neanderthals

Abstract

AbstractResearch on Neanderthals is a topic of growing interest and it may even be considered that this subject will get more attention in the future. The demise and diets of the various Neanderthal populations are controversial issues that promote heated debates. In this work, a bibliometric study of all the publications contained in the Scopus database until 2021 has been conducted, analysing more than 3800 of them. The main authors, institutions and countries researching this subject have been identified, and their future development. Furthermore, the links between the authors, the countries and the topics researched have been analysed through communities detection. The most frequent keyword on this topic is ‘fossil’. Three clearly focused research clusters in this area have been detected: those focused on molecular evolution, those focused on Neanderthal biology, and those focused on palaeoanthropology. Furthermore, it has been noted that the most central countries to the networks of collaboration are the United States, Spain, France and Germany. Research on Neanderthals is in its infancy and the appearance of new clusters is expected, such as those related to the diet and the demise of Neanderthals, considering the growing number of works recently developed on these topics.