"The reconstruction of Neanderthal appearance and behavior has quite a checkered history.
After an initial controversy over whether the fossils really represent
ancient humans or just malformed modern humans, Neanderthals were described in 1864 as distinct hominin species, Homo neanderthalensis.
For a long time, they were considered as brutish cavemen with a club and almost gorilla-like appearance.
Then the scientific opinion shifted and Neanderthals were more and more recognized as human-like and even as geniuses of the ice age (Husemann 2005, Finlayson 2019), based on an avalanche of new evidence for complex human behavior (Nowell 2023, Vernimmen 2023).
We now know that Neanderthals used fire (Angelucci et al. 2023), buried their dead (Balzeau et al. 2020, Dockdrill 2020), created stone circles (Jaubert et al. 2016, Callaway 2016) and bone tools (Soressi et al. 2013), made jewellery from eagle talons (Radovčić et al. 2015, Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. 2019) and used feathers as body decoration (Peresani et al. 2011, Finlayson et al. 2012), made cave art with paintings and engravings (Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014, Hoffmann et al. 2018a, Marquet et al. 2023), played music with bone flutes (Turk et al. 2018), used ochre as pigment (Roebroeks et al. 2012, Hoffmann et al. 2018b) and sophisticated fiber technology (Hardy et al. 2020), produced flour from processed plants (Mariotti Lippi et al. 2023), dived for seafood (Villa et al. 2020), cooked food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics (Hardy et al. 2012, Weyrich et al. 2017), and even produced glue from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure (Blessing & Schmidt 2021, Schmidt et al. 2023).
But it is not just new evidence for Neanderthal behavior that overturned our previous crude image of Neanderthals as dumb brutes, but also new anatomic data.
But it is not just new evidence for Neanderthal behavior that overturned our previous crude image of Neanderthals as dumb brutes, but also new anatomic data.
Contrary to earlier beliefs, more recent studies have demonstrated a fully upright posture with typical human spinal curvature called lordosis (Haeusler et al. 2019).
The latter authors concluded that "after more than a century of alternative views, it should be apparent that there is nothing in Neandertal pelvic or vertebral morphology that rejects their possession of spinal curvatures well within the ranges of variation of healthy recent humans.”
There even exists compelling new evidence for hearing and speech capacities (Conde-Valverde et al. 2021), which “demonstrates that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech” (Starr 2021).
Of course, the undeniable evidence for significant and common genetic admixture (Kuhlwilm et al. 2016, Villanea & Schraiber 2019, Callaway 2021), which makes up 1-4 percent of the modern human genome (Reilly et al. 2022), would suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common gene pool and belonged to the same biospecies.
Of course, the undeniable evidence for significant and common genetic admixture (Kuhlwilm et al. 2016, Villanea & Schraiber 2019, Callaway 2021), which makes up 1-4 percent of the modern human genome (Reilly et al. 2022), would suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common gene pool and belonged to the same biospecies.
Even the skeptic and ID opponent Michael Shermer (2010) agreed in an article for Scientific American that the genomic evidence suggests that our Neanderthal brethren were not a separate species.
However, some human populations such as Australian aboriginals
indeed share with archaic humans like Neanderthals a robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which lead Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare them with Neanderthals.
However, some human populations such as Australian aboriginals
Of course, this also had some typical Darwinist racist connotations. Just like Neanderthals, native Australians were considered primitive and inferior. Nevertheless, the similarities are real and have been confirmed by modern anatomical studies (e.g., Wolpoff & Caspari 1996), which concluded that “the interpretation of Neanderthals as a different species is very unlikely.”
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