Neanderthals: Everything You Thought Was Wrong

Between 2025 and early 2026, three studies landed in quick succession. Together they describe a species that cooperated with Homo sapiens, hunted the largest land animals in Europe, and practiced selective cannibalism of outsiders. This is not the creature most people picture when they hear the word Neanderthal.

The image most people carry, the hunched, grunting, club-wielding brute, was built by one man working from one skeleton in 1911. His name was Marcellin Boule, and the skeleton had arthritis.

Everything since has been a correction.

The skeleton that launched a myth

In 1908, two priest-brothers named Bouyssonie, Jean and Amédée, along with their colleague Louis Bardon, excavated a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton from a cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southern France. They sent it to Marcellin Boule at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Boule spent three years studying it and published his reconstruction in Annales de Paléontologie between 1911 and 1913.

His Neanderthal was stooped, with bent knees, a forward-jutting head, and a shuffling gait. The feet were flat and divergent, almost ape-like. The overall impression was of a creature halfway between a human and a gorilla: muscular but stupid, strong but incapable of the posture or thought that defined true humanity.

The reconstruction was wrong. The La Chapelle specimen was an old male with severe osteoarthritis in his spine, jaw, and hip. His posture in life had been distorted by disease. Boule either missed the pathology or chose to ignore it. His reconstruction reflected what he expected to find: a primitive ancestor safely inferior to modern Europeans.

The correction came in 1957. William Straus and A.J.E. Cave, writing in The Quarterly Review of Biology, reexamined the skeleton and identified the osteoarthritis Boule had overlooked. Their conclusion has been quoted ever since: a healthy Neanderthal, bathed, shaved, and dressed in modern clothing, would attract no more attention on the New York subway than some of its other denizens.

The damage was done. Boule’s image had a forty-six-year head start. It entered museum dioramas, textbooks, cartoons, and popular culture. The word “Neanderthal” became an insult. Undoing it has taken decades of discoveries, each one removing another piece of the myth.

The corrections

The reassessment accelerated after 2010, when each year seemed to bring another finding that expanded what Neanderthals were capable of.

Burial rituals. The Shanidar Cave flower burial, excavated by Ralph Solecki in Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, was the first hint. Pollen clusters around Shanidar IV suggested flowers had been placed with the dead. The interpretation was debated for decades. Then, in 2014, William Rendu and colleagues published a reanalysis in PNAS confirming intentional burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, the same site Boule had studied. In 2020, a Cambridge team led by Graeme Barker announced the discovery of a new articulated skeleton at Shanidar, dubbed “Shanidar Z,” published by Emma Pomeroy and colleagues in Antiquity. The individual had been placed in a deliberate position with a flat stone behind the head.

Symbolic thought. In 2018, Dirk Hoffmann and colleagues published two papers that shifted the timeline. In Science, they reported uranium-thorium dates for cave art at La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales in Spain: at least 65,000 years old, more than 20,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. Neanderthals made it. In Science Advances, the same team dated perforated shells and pigment containers from Cueva de los Aviones to 115,000 years ago. The use of ochre for symbolic purposes was not a sapiens invention.

Medicinal plants. In 2012, Karen Hardy and colleagues analyzed dental calculus from Neanderthal teeth at El Sidrón cave in Spain and found traces of chamomile and yarrow. Neither has nutritional value, and both have long histories in traditional medicine. The study was published in Naturwissenschaften. In 2017, Laura Weyrich and colleagues went further in Nature: calculus from the same site contained poplar bark (which holds salicylic acid, the precursor to aspirin) and Penicillium fungus. The headlines wrote themselves: Neanderthals were self-medicating.

Interbreeding. In 2010, Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the draft Neanderthal genome in Science. The discovery was stark: 1-4% of the DNA of all non-African modern humans comes from Neanderthals. The two species had interbred and produced children together. Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022.

Each finding removed a wall. Neanderthals could think symbolically and plan for the future. They cared for the sick and buried the dead. They used plants as medicine and interbred with our ancestors, leaving genetic traces that billions of people carry today.

Then came 2025 and 2026.

Tinshemet Cave: they worked together

The study by Yossi Zaidner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University, and Marion Prévost of the Hebrew University, published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025, reports findings from Tinshemet Cave in central Israel. The excavations, begun in 2017, uncovered layers dating to between 130,000 and 80,000 years ago, the mid-Middle Paleolithic.

What they found was not mere coexistence. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens at Tinshemet shared stone tool production techniques and hunting strategies. Both species employed the same symbolic pigments, particularly ochre. And around 110,000 years ago, both species appear to have practiced formal burial in the same area of the cave, the first new burial discoveries in Israel in over fifty years. Objects were placed with the dead: tools, animal bones, pieces of ochre.

The word the researchers used was “actively interacted.” This was not two species tolerating each other’s presence at a distance. They were sharing technology, sharing customs, and burying their dead in the same ground.

The Levant, the strip of land connecting Africa to Eurasia, was the zone where the two species overlapped longest. Earlier sites like Qafzeh and Skhul had documented Homo sapiens presence as far back as 120,000 years ago, while Neanderthals occupied the same region in later periods. The two species traded places across the Levant over tens of thousands of years. Tinshemet goes further. The evidence points to simultaneous presence and cultural exchange at a single site.

Lehringen: they hunted giants

The site has been known since 1948. At Lehringen in Lower Saxony, Germany, a team of amateur archaeologists led by headmaster Alexander Rosenbrock excavated a straight-tusked elephant skeleton from 125,000-year-old lake sediments. Lodged between its ribs was a 2.38-meter wooden thrusting spear, complete and intact, the only whole Paleolithic hunting weapon known from that era.

For nearly eighty years, the association between spear and skeleton was debated. The amateur excavation conditions left room for doubt. Had the spear been driven into the elephant, or had the bones shifted during burial and trapped the weapon by coincidence? The question was not academic. If Neanderthals could hunt Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant, the largest land animal in Pleistocene Europe, they were not scavengers picking at carcasses. They were apex predators capable of organized, high-risk cooperative hunting.

Ivo Verheijen of the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage, working with colleagues including Thomas Terberger of the University of Göttingen, reexamined the Lehringen faunal remains stored at the Schöningen Research Museum. Their results, published in Scientific Reports in 2026, settled the question.

Cut marks scored the inside of the ribs and the vertebrae. The chest cavity had been opened deliberately, and internal organs had been removed while the meat was still fresh. The elephant was a male, around thirty years old, representing roughly 3,500 kilograms of usable meat, organs, and fat: enough to sustain a large group for weeks.

The freshness of the cuts ruled out scavenging. A naturally dead elephant in a warm climate would decompose in days. The internal cut marks proved that Neanderthals reached the organs before decay set in. They killed this animal with a thrusting spear on the shore of a lake, and then they took it apart with the systematic knowledge of a butcher who has done this before.

Goyet: they ate outsiders

The third study, published in Scientific Reports in late 2025, examined bones from the Troisième caverne of Goyet in Belgium. The site, dated to 41,000-45,000 years ago, had previously yielded Neanderthal remains showing signs of cannibalism. The new study, led by a team from the CNRS, the Université de Bordeaux, and the Université d’Aix-Marseille, added DNA analysis and isotopic measurements to the picture.

The victims were adult women and children. Their bones showed cut marks consistent with defleshing, deliberate breaking for marrow extraction, and selective processing of the lower limbs. This was not ritual treatment of the community’s own dead. DNA analysis established their sex and kinship relationships. Isotopic measurements showed they had grown up eating different food and drinking different water from the local group. The two lines of evidence converged: the individuals who were eaten were outsiders.

The researchers described the practice as “practical” rather than ritual. The distinction matters. Ritual cannibalism, documented in some modern human societies, involves consuming members of one’s own community as part of funerary rites or ancestor veneration. What happened at Goyet was different. Outsiders, women and children from other groups, were killed, butchered, and consumed for their caloric value. The lower limbs, the meatiest parts of the human body, were targeted first.

This is not comfortable information. It does not fit the emerging narrative of Neanderthals as gentle, misunderstood cousins. It complicates the picture. A species capable of burying its dead with ochre and flowers, of sharing technology with another human species, of hunting elephants with wooden spears, was also capable of eating people who were not part of its group.

The species that was never simple

The temptation, with each new discovery, is to replace one myth with another. The “brutish caveman” lasted a century. The replacement narrative, “misunderstood cousin, just like us,” has been building for twenty years. Both miss the point.

The evidence from these three studies describes a species that cooperated across species boundaries at Tinshemet, hunted megafauna at Lehringen, and practiced selective cannibalism at Goyet. All three behaviors are documented in Homo sapiens as well. Cooperation, predation, and violence toward outsiders are not contradictions. They are the full range of what a cognitively complex social species is capable of.

Boule’s error in 1911 was conceptual as much as anatomical. He assumed that a species older and different from us must be simpler than us: less intelligent, less capable, less human. Every discovery since has been a correction of that assumption, not toward a flattering portrait, but toward accuracy.

Neanderthals buried their dead and painted caves. They used medicine and shared tools with another species. They hunted the largest animals on the continent, and they killed and ate people who did not belong to their group.

The creature Boule reconstructed, the stooped brute with the vacant stare, was a projection. What the evidence actually shows is a species as complicated as the one studying it.

Related reading

• Red: The Oldest Idea in the World. How ochre became the first symbolic material in human history, used by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
• The Body’s Oldest Drug. Ritual dance and altered states in deep prehistory.
• Blombos Cave. The South African site where the oldest known symbolic engravings were found.
• Sungir Burial. A 34,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic burial that reveals the complexity of early human ritual.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Marcellin Boule, L’homme fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Annales de Paléontologie, 1911-1913
• William L. Straus and A. J. E. Cave, ‘Pathology and the Posture of Neanderthal Man,’ Quarterly Review of Biology, 1957
• Ralph Solecki, Shanidar: The First Flower People, 1971
• William Rendu et al., ‘Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints,’ PNAS, 2014
• Emma Pomeroy, Graeme Barker et al., ‘New Neanderthal remains associated with the flower burial at Shanidar Cave,’ Antiquity, 2020
• Dirk L. Hoffmann et al., ‘U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art,’ Science, 2018
• Dirk L. Hoffmann et al., ‘Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals 115,000 years ago,’ Science Advances, 2018
• Karen Hardy et al., ‘Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus,’ Naturwissenschaften, 2012
• Laura S. Weyrich et al., ‘Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus,’ Nature, 2017
• Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo et al., ‘A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,’ Science, 2010
• David Reich et al., ‘Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia,’ Nature, 2010
• Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, Basic Books, 2014
• Yossi Zaidner, Israel Hershkovitz, Marion Prévost et al., Tinshemet Cave study, Nature Human Behaviour, 2025
• Ivo Verheijen, Thomas Terberger et al., reanalysis of the Lehringen elephant and spear, Scientific Reports, 2026
• CNRS / Université de Bordeaux / Université d’Aix-Marseille team, study of cannibalised remains from the Troisième caverne of Goyet, Scientific Reports, 2025
• Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, Bloomsbury, 2020
• Erik Trinkaus, The Shanidar Neandertals, Academic Press, 1983
• Jean-Jacques Hublin et al., publications on Neanderthal chronology and the Initial Upper Paleolithic
• Tom Higham et al., ‘The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance,’ Nature, 2014
• Ludovic Slimak et al., ‘Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France,’ Science Advances, 2022
• Tomislav Maricic et al., research on Neanderthal cognition-related genes (FOXP2 and regulatory variants), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology