Neanderthals were dim brutes who died out because we were smarter

What actually happened

The brute image traces to a single bad reconstruction. Marcellin Boule's 1911 analysis of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton portrayed a stooped, bent-kneed creature. The skeleton was an arthritic old man. The posture was pathology, and the correction was published in 1957, but the picture stuck for generations.

The evidence now runs the other way. A 2018 Science paper dated cave paintings in three Spanish caves to more than 64,000 years ago, at least 20,000 years before modern humans reached Iberia, meaning Neanderthals made them. They produced birch-bark tar, which requires controlled heating in a low-oxygen environment. They collected and pierced shells, used eagle talons as ornaments, and cared for injured group members long enough for serious wounds to heal.

And they are not entirely gone. Since the 2010 draft Neanderthal genome, we have known that most people outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. "They lost, we won" is a poor summary of a population that hybridized with ours and left its genes in your genome.