What Life Was Really Like For Neanderthals

When trying to flesh out the bones of history, it's important to show a bit of humility because sometimes the difference between obvious knowledge and false beliefs is the date on which you read about them. For instance, in 2011, an archaeologist writing for the BBC asserted with certainty that Britain's earliest human inhabitants had pale skin, red, blond, or dark hair, and other traits typically attributed to the "Caucasoid population of Europe." But that conventional wisdom was full of more bull than Michael Jordan's Steakhouse. DNA analyses later revealed that Britain's prehistoric residents had dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.

People also drew false conclusions about Neanderthals in the past, and perhaps in the future, presently accepted beliefs will be disproven, too. When quarrymen stumbled across the first documented Neanderthal bones in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856, they thought the remains came from a bear, according to Live Science. For a long time after that, many of us homo sapiens — a species so pretentious that it named itself the Latin phrase for "wise man" — imagined Neanderthals as the dumb-jock caricatures of antiquity, brutish galoots who lived in caves and sported muscles that were as strong as their brains were weak. However, professor and professional Neanderthal enthusiast Chris Stringer has called that an "unfair" characterization, explaining that the wise man's cave-dwelling cousins were pretty darn smart. Sadly, life in their day was pretty unfair to them, too.