>>17994550 (OP)
From what we can tell from their remains and the culture they left behind it's probable that they were about as intelligent as Homo Sapiens, maybe a little bit more. Given that why the hell would they go into Africa? The more intelligent Sapiens left it as fast as they could.
>>17994550 (OP)
There probably were and the map is just really bad. It's also assuming the Mediterranean islands were unsettled even though they would have been fused to the mainland at the time, the fact it uses modern topology is extremely misleading.