With Europe in the grip of an Ice Age and with their smarter cousins, Homo-sapiens, spreading across the continent, a study says the last hominids or Neanderthals holed up in a refuge on the balmy southern tip of Europe until their lineage withered away.
Homo-neanderthalis may have drawn his final breath as recently as 24,000 years ago, the study authors an international team of palaeontologists say.
Previous estimates have put their extinction around 30,000-33,000 years ago. The date is fiercely debated, as is the greater mystery - who, or what, killed them?
The new evidence which suggests the much longer survival comes from artefacts found at a site on Gibraltar called Gorham's Cave, where Neanderthal stone tools were discovered more than 50 years ago.
Further excavations of the cave floor between 1999 and 2005 have exposed the remains of hearths where Neanderthals, known to be skilled with flints, would keep a fire.
The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to date pieces of charcoal found in the hearths, and concluded that Neanderthals lived there until 28,000 years ago and possibly as recently as 24,000 years ago.
Favourite cave
Wrongly characterised in popular humour as moronic grunters, the Neanderthals had the smarts to choose an excellent site, according to the paper, which is published in Nature, the British weekly science journal.
Natural light penetrated deep within the cave's walls and a high ceiling allowed smoke to ventilate. The cave was "a favoured location that was visited repeatedly over many thousands of years," say the authors.
The location, too, was a winner. While northerly latitudes of Europe remained locked in a deep and hostile chill, the warmer Mediterranean rim offered a good chance of survival for hunter-gatherers like the Neanderthals.
"The last Neanderthals that occupied Gorham's Cave had access to a diverse community of plants and vertebrates on the sandy plains, open woodland and shrubland, wetlands, cliff and coastal environments surrounding the site," the study says.
"Such ecological diversity might have facilitated their long survival," it adds.
Seven other sites occupied by Neanderthals have been found in the rock of Gibraltar, which is only six kilometres (3.75 miles) long.
What killed them?
As to the great ‘whodunnit’ of palaeontology, the paper discounts the theory that these Neanderthals were killed by Homo-sapiens in the competition for food and territory.
Evidence of stone-age technology, about 100 kilometres east of the caves shows that modern man had ventured into the neighbourhood at the time when the Neanderthals lived there.
The paper suggests for several thousand years the region was a "mosaic" of remnant Neanderthals and pioneering Homo-sapiens living in thinly-scattered communities.
Another theory to explain their disappearance is that they didn’t completely disappear. Under this hypothesis, Neanderthals and Homo-sapiens co-mingled and far from being a dead branch of the human tree, they may actually have bequeathed some of their traits in the Homo-sapiens genes that we see today.
The new paper, lead-authored by Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, does not address this controversial theory, but notes there is no evidence of "transitional" tools or activities at the cave.
That adds weight to the argument that the last Neanderthals had only limited contact with homo-sapiens so inter-breeding was unlikely.
The first evidence for the Neanderthals emerged in 1856, when workers at a lime quarry in the Neander Valley, in western Germany came across bones initially thought to be that of a bear.
Since then, the remains of about 400 Neanderthals have been found, at sites ranging from southern England to continental Europe and the Middle East.