Did Neandertals Live a Sustainable Lifestyle?

I don't know if any of you saw The Human Spark, the 3-part PBS program hosted by Alan Alda in January. It examined what made us Cro-Magnons different from the Neandertals--basically why they died out and we didn't. Here is a comment I made at the time:

I was disappointed that the point of the program seemed to be to find out why we were "better" than the Neanderthals. I guess Alda was just kidding around, but this furthers the public's misconception that the "winners" in the evolution game--the survivors, the fittest--are objectively better than the species that die out. The winners are just those that are better adapted to the particular environment they find themselves in at that time.

The smaller, more dispersed Neanderthal settlements and their lack of creativity and technological innovation made me think the following: What they seem to have had was a sustainable system . . . the very thing we Moderns have not been able to come up with. What's wrong with using the same toolbox of technological skills for hundreds of thousands of years if it's working just fine?

The differences between us and the Neanderthals are undeniably fascinating. The comments referring to our superiority were tedious.

Also, my husband wants to know how we know all that cultural and genetic innovation that we Cro-Magnons developed, from language to spearpoints, was for hunting . . . maybe it was for waging war instead?