The Smart Neanderthal

Many people still believe Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to “Modern Humans.”

In May 2016, anthropologist Clive Finlayson and his family went to the Gibraltar Museum in Spain to see forensic artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis’s life-sized reconstructions of two Neanderthals discovered in Gorham’s Cave on the island. Their statues were based on the remains of an adult female and a four-year-old boy excavated in the cave in 1848 and 1926. Named Gibraltar 1 and 2, the remains had exhibited little more than the nasal cavities, eye sockets, brow ridges and brain cases characteristic of Neanderthals. But with skin and flesh added by the artists, the reconstructed Neanderthals – who probably weren’t even contemporaries – looked fully human. They were no longer reducible to the anatomical characteristics previously identified by paleoanthropologists.

Researchers traditionally regarded Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to the direct ancestors of contemporary humans. The intellectual inferiority of Neanderthals is central to the broader claim that their ultimate extinction was a consequence of that inferiority and the arrival of...