One of the family (Image: Richard Wilkinson) Sleeping with the brute
They were technologically savvy, creative and cultured. So maybe it’s time we accepted that Neanderthals were people just like us
EVER since the first fossils of a brawny, low-browed, chimp-chested hominin were unearthed in Germany in 1856, Neanderthals have stirred both fascination and disdain. German pathologist Rudolf Virchow decreed that the bones belonged to a wounded Cossack whose brow ridges reflected years of pain-driven frowns. French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule recognised the fossils as ancient, but ignored signs that the specimen he studied suffered from arthritis. It was he who…
