Fairly soon after it was found to be modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals – not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians – the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover. When their remains were first discovered in 1856, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel had suggested naming them ‘Homo stupidus’. But in the twenty-first century, these same Neanderthals, the dictionary definition of simple-minded, loutish, uncivilised thugs, have become oddly rehabilitated.
