National Geographic - Sarah Zielinski, 10/12/12
The Neanderthals are both the most familiar and the least understood of all our fossil kin.
Like some other Neanderthals, "Wilma," a DNA-based reconstruction, was red-headed, freckled, and fair. Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic
For decades after the initial discovery of their bones in a cave in Germany in 1856 Homo neanderthalensis was viewed as a hairy brute who stumbled around Ice Age Eurasia on bent knees, eventually to be replaced by elegant, upright Cro-Magnon, the true ancestor of modern Europeans.
Science has long since killed off the notion of that witless caveman, but Neanderthals have still been regarded as quintessential losers—a large-brained, well-adapted species of human that went extinct nevertheless, yielding the Eurasian continent to anatomically modern humans, who began to migrate out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.
To read the rest of this story, visit NationalGeographic.com.
