A new take on Neanderthals

They have long been derided as a knuckle-dragging species, but new discoveries are setting the record straight about the stereotype of Homo neanderthalensis, as well as teaching us about ourselves

- Nikhil Krishnan

THERE'S A HUMAN TYPE WE'VE ALL MET: people who find a beleaguered underdog to stick up for. Sometimes, the underdog is an individual - a runt of a boxer, say. Sometimes, it is a nation, threatened by a larger neighbour or by the rising sea. Sometimes, it is a tribe of Indigenous people whose land and health are imperilled. Sometimes, it is a language down to its last native speakers. The underdog needn't be human: there are species of insect, even of fungi, that have their advocates. But what all these cases all have in common is that the objects of concern are still alive, if only just. The point of the advocacy is to prevent their extinction. But what if it's too late? Can there be advocates for the extinct?

The past few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: "Neanderthals". They died out, it appears, 40,000 years ago. That number - 40,000 - is as totemic to Neanderthal specialists as that better-known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.

What distinguishes these new books isn't just what they tell us about an extinct sub-species of humans, but the surprising passion they bring to their subject. Their authors are enraged that popular ideas about the Neanderthals lag so far behind the cutting edge of palaeontological research - research that has brought the Neanderthals closer to us than they have been in 40,000 years.

In speculative fiction by HG Wells, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton, William Golding and even, improbably, William Shatner, the Neanderthals have tended to be either brutes or hippies, savages or shamans. A band formed in the 1990s called the Neanderthals was best known for singing crude songs in animal skins. A critic once used the phrase "Neanderthal TV" to refer to television for laddish yobs. The fact that we need no explanation for that reference indicates just how widespread the stereotype is.