New thinking about Neanderthals

We knew almost nothing about Neanderthals, but already we assumed they were ogres and losers.
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There is a worldview, the opposite of Joachim Neander’s, that sees our planet as a product of only tumult and indifference. In such a world, it’s possible for an entire species to be ground into extinction by forces beyond its control and then, 40,000 years later, be dug up and made to endure an additional century and a half of bad luck and abuse.
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That’s what happened to the Neanderthals. And it’s what we did to them. But recently, after we’d snickered over their skulls for so long, it stopped being clear who the boneheads were.
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A lot of the new thinking about Neanderthals comes from revisiting material in museum collections, excavated decades ago, and re-examining it with new technology or simply with open minds. The real surprise of these discoveries may not be the competence of Neanderthals but how obnoxiously low our expectations for them have been — the bias with which too many scientists approached that other Us. One archaeologist called these researchers “modern human supremacists.”

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