The Neanderthal Renaissance

When Western science first encountered the Neanderthals in 1856, they were a jumble of bones – one of which was a broken skull dome. Now scholars began asking the deeper question: so Neanderthals looked the part, but were they truly ‘people’, like us? In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley claimed a striking similarity between Neanderthal brow ridges and the ‘lowering, threatening expression’ he perceived in the skulls of Aboriginal peoples – ignoring the clear difference in anatomical shape.

Source: aeon.co