>Can you point me to some sources about Neanderthal animal domestication? That’s very interesting, I’d like to read more on that!

The popular consensus is that Neanderthals did not domesticate animals at all. Slowly, the consensus is warming up to the fact that they were great hunters. I have multiple reasons why I think Neanderthals could have domesticated animals (IMO not a trait that has to be exclusive to a single species):

- Neanderthal civilization lived for much longer than Sapiens

- Long periods of time spent indoors

They could have taken an animal pair indoors, maybe for food or maybe just for fun, and ended up keeping them for a while. They likely figured out how to manage these animals and after a couple of thousand years we end up with dogs.

- High calorie requirements

Specifically, during six to eight months when it was too cold or food was scarce. They had to keep up muscle mass if they wanted to hunt in the summers. This means they had to have a source of nutrition that was high in protein and fats. This points to dairy. Raw dairy doesn't go bad, it changes into cheese and is incredibly versatile and keeps "fresh" for very long. They would have to necessarily been able to manage animals. Any possible solution would have to be generally applicable to most instances of the kind of shelter they lived in. After all, we aren't fixating on one single group of Neanderthals.

They were also hunters. So being able to release animals (domesticated or otherwise) at a whim when hunting bigger prey would have been an advantage.

>Specifically about clothes and shelters though. To my knowledge we really don’t have finds indicating that they could or would do this.

I think clothes are pretty simply explained: to live in the biting cold, even in the summers, you couldn't survive unless you had protective clothing. It's very plausible that they at the very least had clothes made of multiple layers animal skins held together by fragments of bone / rock. It's easy enough. They also killed large cold-adapted animals, so finding insulating hides wouldn't have been very difficult.

And as for shelters, nothing comes close to caves (on the surface or a ways underground) for insultation.

>Regarding group size, I think you’re reading much too much into it. The group size is similar to wolf packs. Wolves are smart too, are great at hunting in groups, have stable social hierarchies, and have been around for a long time.

I don't know what exactly you're criticizing but I think the group sizes would be small because:

- Cold climates limit movement, forcing your group to a certain region. And the region has to be allowed to "regenerate" resources, which caps the number of people it can support

- The more people you stuff inside a cave the more food you need.

- Consensus breaks down after 10 (8?) or so people. I doubt it would be possible to live conflict-free with too many people inside a crammed space. Plus, Dunbar's Number. To make even 20 people work for that long you'd have to be honest to a fault and guileless. I think it's likely that even though they lived in small groups in caves, they might have had some contact with other nearby Neanderthal groups. It's easy to conclude that this would help them basically live with their friends (aka people they don't bear animosity towards) for 6-8 months of the year.