What it has also done is trigger a landslip of studies and academic papers which have buried any hope of popular understanding. Genetics, 3D imaging, the use of carbon-14 and strontium isotopes have all helped reveal intricate details of physiognomy and activity (how they sat, what they carried), as well as possible social structures. But perhaps the most striking advance has been in the reach of analytical methods. Relativism has replaced hierarchy as the overall context for interpretation. In the past few decades, there have been more finds in more caves, more bones and stone tools to measure, more middens to pick over, more articulations of skeletons to examine. It was inevitable - the clue was in the name: Homo sapiens. Neanderthals were made extinct by an altogether smarter creature. The story, as I received it then, retained something of the racially hierarchical views at large when the first fossilised bones were recovered in Germany, from near the Neander river, in 1856. Their vanishing from the fossil record some 40,000 years ago was a result of competition, along with a little interbreeding, with our own forebears.
When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in smoky caves and loping across the tundra.
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