The extinction of Neanderthals remains one of the great unresolved questions of the evolutionary path followed by the genus Homo. What are the causes that led to the disappearance of this species? What is the time frame and spatial context? What was the chain of events that led to the development of this phenomenon? Last Neanderthals is the major new Synergy research project funded with 13 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC), which will seek answers to these questions, extending archaeological research beyond the context of Western and Central Europe. Last Neanderthals will extend archaeological investigations to sites in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and, even further east, to those in Western and Central Asia, to shed light on the chain of events that led to the extinction of the Neanderthals. Last Neanderthals is the first ERC Synergy Grant won by the University of Bologna: Stefano Benazzi, Professor at the Department of Cultural Heritage is the project coordinator. In addition to the University of Bologna, the project is led by the University of Siena with PI Francesco Berna, and the University of Haifa with PI Omry Barzilai, in collaboration with the Universities of Pisa and Cologne. "To get to convincingly reconstruct the chain of events that led to the extinction of Neanderthals, we need new and more extensive archaeological data," Benazzi, Berna and Barzilai explain. "The information we have gathered so far comes mainly from archaeological sites in Western and Central Europe: now we want to expand the research to Western and Central Asia and Eastern and Southeastern Europe". Before their sudden disappearance some 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals in fact survived for 350,000 years in a vast territory stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to southern Siberia. Today, we know that the European archaeological sites from which most of the Neanderthal finds have emerged so far are located on the periphery of the regions where the last Neanderthals lived.