Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
One possibility is that those in the grave were killed in a battle, maybe with a neighboring community. But suspicion also falls on the Vikings: "We will never know if they were killed in a raid, but it remains a possibility because of the date of the grave" and the fatal trauma suffered by three of the men, said study co-author Elīna Pētersone-Gordina, an archaeologist at the University of Latvia.
Radiocarbon dating indicates that the grave is from the second half of the ninth century, which is considered the early Viking Age.
The grave is one of hundreds at the Čunkāni-Dreņģeri cemetery, near the Gulf of Riga, a sheltered bay of the Baltic Sea. The cemetery site was discovered in 1924 and contains people who were buried in riverside terraces there between the seventh and 11th centuries, during Latvia's Iron Age.
Most graves in the region contain only a single set of remains. But here, six people were buried in a single grave, and it seems that at least three were killed during a violent event, the researchers reported.
Strange burial
Despite the apparently violent deaths, the group was buried with care and interred with traditional grave goods and according to local customs. The only female was buried with her head pointing toward the northwest, while all of the males were placed in a row beside her, with their heads pointing toward the southeast — a distinction also seen at other local burials from this time.
The researchers stressed that this was not a "mass grave," where bodies were quickly dumped without order. Instead, they consider it a "multiple burial," where each body was properly laid out and accompanied by traditional grave goods.
This careful burial hints that the dead were members of a respected group, while their burial in a single grave indicates that they died at the same time, the researchers wrote in the study.
"They were most likely local people," Pētersone-Gordina told Live Science in an email.
Genetic studies showed that all of the dead had Indigenous Baltic ancestry, while aspects of the burial matched others in the Čunkāni-Dreņģeri cemetery, she said.
In the ninth century, Latvia was not part of the Scandinavian Viking world but was inhabited by descendants of Indigenous Balts, which included peoples such as the Semigallians and the Curonians, she said. The six people in the newly analyzed burial were Semigallian, an Iron Age group who farmed the region's large and fertile plains.
It's plausible that the people in the grave were killed by raiders, and the Vikings were the most obvious suspects, the researchers noted. "Given the timing, a Viking raid remains a possibility," Pētersone-Gordina said.
It's known Vikings or their predecessors were in the Eastern Baltic area around that time: two Scandinavian boat burials dated to around 750, for example, were found on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 2008 and 2010. These burials held the remains of men with battle wounds, indicating they had suffered violent deaths.
No relation
Although two of the men and the boy buried in the Semigallian grave (and possibly the girl, but ancient DNA could not be extracted from her remains) were related, the two other men were not.
This suggests that the two unrelated men were from the same community or extended household as the other victims, rather than from the same family, but were killed in the same violent event, the researchers wrote in the study.
Whatever it was — a raid or a battle — the event was brutal. Marks on the bones show that one man suffered defensive cuts on his forearm and hand, another was killed by a blow that shattered his jaw, and the third was almost decapitated.
It's possible that the fourth man and the two children died from soft-tissue injuries that could not be determined from the surviving remains, the researchers noted.
Rimantas Jankauskas, an anthropologist and archaeologist at Vilnius University in Lithuania who was not involved in the study, welcomed the investigation into the Eastern Baltic's Viking Age.
Although these individuals could have died from violence within their own community or from a neighboring community, it's also possible that they perished in a Viking raid, he told Live Science in an email.
Additionally, the study provides new insight into the social organization of the Semigallian people at that time, including hints of an emerging aristocratic structure that was reflected in the care lavished on the burial, Jankauskas said.
See how much you know about ancient norsemen with our Viking quiz.
'> 1,200-year-old burial in Latvia holds people who died of 'sharp force' injuries, possibly from a Viking raid
(Image credit: jjwithers via Getty Images)This centuries-old settlement, whose name may be a Spanish adaptation of an Indigenous word for the area, was the political and ceremonial center for the Ancestral Puebloan people from about A.D. 850 to 1250. At its heart is Pueblo Bonito ("Pretty Village"), a four-story stone complex with more than 600 rooms and 35 subterranean ceremonial chambers called kivas.
Experts estimate that builders hauled over 200,000 timber beams from distant mountains to construct these complexes, where the beams were used to strengthen buildings made mostly from sandstone blocks. The town once stood at the hub of a road network that spanned more than 400 miles (640 kilometers), and excavations of imported Mesoamerican macaws and cacao there confirm trade with distant regions.
2. Cahokia (Illinois)
(Image credit: GummyBone via Getty Images)Cahokia was once the largest Indigenous American settlement north of Mexico and home to up to 40,000 people in A.D. 1100 — comparable in size to major cities in medieval Europe, historian Christoph Strobel, a specialist in Indigenous history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, told Live Science. Residents there lived in houses made from "wattle and daub" — clay or mud plastered on a framework of sticks — in a town at the site, with large public plazas, wooden palisades and dozens of ceremonial earthen mounds. Indigenous people even transported a 5-ton (4.5 metric ton) tree from more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) away, and then turned it into a marker known as the Mitchell Log.
Archaeological studies indicate that many people from distant places also visited, perhaps to take part in ceremonies. The location is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and features Monks Mound, a 100-foot-tall (30 meters) terraced earthwork, as well as the reconstruction of a "woodhenge" of timber circles that tracks solstices and equinoxes. Strobel thinks Cahokia may be the most significant pre-Columbian location in the United States. "It's an incredibly important site," he said.
3. Mound Key (Estero Bay, Florida)
(Image credit: Public Domain)Mound Key is the largest of several islands made of piles of shells around Estero Bay. Long ago, it seems to have been two small islands created by mangroves, but centuries of feasting on shellfish by Indigenous Americans transformed it into two artificial mounds of shells covered with vegetation. In some places, the mounds extend more than 30 feet (9 m) above the water; it is so large now that it is split in two only at high tide. Mound Key itself is estimated to consist of several millions of shells, mostly from oysters.
Before Europeans arrived here in the 16th century, this shell island was called Calos by the Calusa people who lived there and developed it into a thriving maritime city.
4. Sitka (Alaska)
(Image credit: Edward Simmons via Alamy)Sitka National Historical Park preserves the battlefield of the 1804 Battle of Sitka, which was fought between Tlingit warriors and colonial Russian troops and was the last major armed conflict between Europeans and people native to Alaska. At that time, Russia claimed to own Alaska (they sold it to the United States in 1867). The battle was sparked when Russian fur traders encroached on tribal territory by building a fort at Sitka in 1802, but the Tlingit destroyed the enemy fort and expelled the Russians.
They then built their own fort to withstand the expected Russian counterattack, but they were forced to abandon it when they were bombarded by Russian ships in 1804. The dispute continued for several decades and was only fully resolved when the United States purchased Alaska.
5. Walnut Canyon (Arizona)
(Image credit: mauritius images GmbH via Alamy)This site preserves more than 80 cliff dwellings built by the Northern Sinagua people between A.D. 1125 and 1250. People can reach the site by following a walking trail through a deep limestone and sandstone gorge about 10 miles (16 km) southeast of Flagstaff. The cliff dwellings were constructed inside natural caves in the limestone, which gave them insulation against cold and heat, while their location high above the canyon floor was defensive.
Strobel said Walnut Canyon is a lesser-known site but a remarkable example of Indigenous Americans overcoming relatively dry conditions by carefully managing water. The inhabitants of the caves farmed crops on the flat land along the canyon rim but took water from the river at the bottom of the canyon to fill cisterns.
6. Chimney Rock (Colorado)
(Image credit: mdesigner125 via Getty Images)Chimney Rock is a single feature within a large forest that contains more than 80 archaeological sites of the Ancestral Puebloan people. The rock itself is one of two natural spires (the other is named "Companion Rock") that were used roughly 1,000 years ago to mark the position of a "lunar standstill" every 18.6 years — a key astronomical observance among Indigenous Americans, Strobel said.
A multiroom "Great House" made of sandstone, clay and timber — in exactly the style of Chaco Canyon, about 100 miles (160 km) to the south — stood on a ridge near the rock spires, with sweeping views of the surrounding territory. Archaeologists think the Chimney Rock settlements made up a regional ceremonial center, with common people in the lower valley supporting elites who lived on the ridge and watched the skies.
7. Blackwater Draw (New Mexico)
(Image credit: Efrain Padro via Alamy)Blackwater Draw is the main archaeological site with evidence of the Clovis culture, which was once thought to be the oldest Indigenous culture in the Americas. The Clovis people (named after the nearby town of Clovis) lived there about 13,000 years ago, and archaeologists have found evidence of the stone and bone tools they used and the animals they hunted, including mammoths and dire wolves. The first evidence of the Clovis people was found nearby in 1929, and at Blackwater Draw itself in 1932.
However, later archaeological finds predate this evidence, and the discovery of footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico now seems to confirm that there were humans in this region up to 23,000 years ago, long before the Clovis people.
How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!
'> 7 extraordinary Indigenous sites in the US, from Chaco Canyon to Chimney Rock
An Inuit carving of a European, dated to around AD 1350 — the earliest depiction of a European in the Western Hemisphere. (Image credit: Canadian Museum of History, IMG2009-0063-0154-Dm)QUICK FACTS
Name: Inuit figurine
What it is: A carved wood figurine
Where it is from: Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada
When it was made: Circa 1350
This wooden figurine was discovered in 1977 in an early house built by the ancestors of the Inuit on Baffin Island in northern Canada. The unique carving represents a person wearing European clothing and a cross on their chest. Dated to 1350, the figurine is the earliest Indigenous representation of a European anywhere in the Western Hemisphere and probably depicts a Norseman.
The tiny driftwood carving, which is currently on display at the Canadian Museum of History, measures just 2.1 inches (5.4 centimeters) tall. According to the museum, the featureless face and stumpy arms are common in 14th-century Inuit carvings, but the depiction of a non-Inuit is unique.
The mysterious figure wears a long robe or tunic with a cross on the front — a garment that is similar to those worn in the 11th to 13th centuries by Norse Christians from Greenland. The Norse sagas mention a place called "Helluland," which Leif Eriksson (also spelled Erikson) visited in the early 11th century and is most likely Baffin Island.
Around A.D. 1000, Norse explorers landed in what is now Newfoundland and set up camp at a site archaeologists call l'Anse aux Meadows. Wood buildings and remains from iron production are all that is left of the earliest European settlement in the Americas.
The Norse likely made multiple trips from Greenland to Canada over the centuries in order to trade metal and cloth with the Inuit's ancestors, known as the Thule, and procure walrus ivory in return, as European-origin artifacts have been found in early Inuit houses on Baffin Island. But the Norse eventually abandoned their westward trade routes, possibly due to the resistance of the Indigenous people and the long distance.
This wooden figurine may commemorate a meeting between the Inuit and the Norse and is especially important because it was crafted long before sustained contact in the late 15th century, according to the museum. It is also the earliest evidence of the Indigenous perspective of visitors from the east, revealing which characteristics of the Norse the artisan observed and felt were important to depict.
For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.
Battersea Shield
Java Mask
Benin Bronze
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'> Inuit figurine: A 700-year-old Indigenous carving of a European made a century before Columbus
Great Dying" — a combination of epidemic disease, warfare and enslavement that led to a rapid decline in the Native population.
For centuries, researchers have been trying to figure out how many Indigenous people lived in the Americas just prior to the fateful arrival of European colonizers.
The answer to that question has been surprisingly elusive, and estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological sites and land carrying capacity in the Western Hemisphere have varied wildly.
Recent research into Native American demography has revealed that the population peaked several centuries before Europeans showed up on the shores of North America — and that if Europeans had arrived at that peak, the entire history of the continent may have been different.
Early estimates of the Indigenous population
People have lived in the Americas for at least 14,000 years, having entered the continents via the region around the Bering Strait. Archaeological evidence shows these first Americans dispersed throughout the newly encountered lands fairly quickly. But what happened to the population between that dispersal and the arrival of Columbus is a huge unknown; estimates of the number of Indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 have ranged from 1 million to 112 million people.
"We don't have good quantitative estimates," George Milner, an anthropologist at Penn State, told Live Science. "The numbers are all over the place."
One of the first modern researchers who attempted to quantify the Indigenous population prior to Columbus was anthropologist Henry Dobyns. In a 1983 book, Dobyns used estimates of how many people each type of landscape could support as well as historical records of 16th-century disease epidemics to arrive at an Indigenous population estimate of around 112 million people — more than 100 times larger than some previous experts had believed.
"In essence, Dobyns filled up the landscape to its maximum carrying capacity, so that all environmentally similar places were occupied by the same number of people," Milner said. "He also made the assumption that epidemic disease spread widely and universally, which would make sense if the landscape was filled up."
But a burst of archaeological research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that the Americas were not uniformly settled, Milner said. Dobyns' estimates were therefore much too high.
Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population.
Robert Kelly, archaeologist at University of Wyoming
Researchers then began to focus on creating population estimates for specific regions of the hemisphere, using techniques such as the relative density of pottery sherds at a site, the number of stone tools and flakes, the number and size of houses, and mortality trends from human skeletons.
In a 2019 study, geographers compiled 129 population estimates from 82 published studies to model the hemisphere-wide distribution of the Indigenous population in 1492. The researchers split the hemisphere into seven regions — the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Inca territory, Amazonia, North America and the rest of the Americas — and reached a combined estimate of 60.5 million. Their estimate for North America (modern-day Canada and the U.S.) was about 3 million to 6 million, less than one-third of Dobyns' estimate of 18 million.
Native Americans lived in large settlements such as this one at Cahokia Mounds, an archaeological site near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri. (Image credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images)A regional perspective – North America
The 2019 study found that the most populous groups in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 were the Aztecs, largely in modern-day Mexico; and the Inca, who lived along the west coast of South America.
But the people we know the most about from an archaeological standpoint are Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada.
In a 2010 study, Milner and geographer George Chaplin zoomed in on the data from eastern North America, compiling historic group sizes and sizes of archaeological occupation areas to estimate the location and size of "population aggregates." Using this method, their overall estimate for the eastern U.S. and southeastern Canada was about 1.6 million people.
"Our mean estimates," Milner and Chaplin wrote, "indicate that North America held roughly 2.8 to 5.7 million people" or a "best estimate" of 3.8 million people in the early 16th century, before European diseases dramatically decreased the size of the Indigenous population.
"If you want to start estimating specific populations, you should use measures that work across regions," Robert Kelly, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science. "People produce things that can be carbon-dated everywhere, because everyone had to build fires for heat and for cooking."
Charcoal from hearths is one of the main human-made things that archaeologists use to radiocarbon-date a site. The radiocarbon data provides a range of dates showing when the firewood was likeliest to have been used.
In North America, many of those carbon-14 dates from charcoal, as well as from animal bones and plant remains from archaeological sites, have been entered into the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD).
In a 2009 study, Matthew Peros, a geographer at Bishop's University in Quebec, and co-authors mathematically combined the radiocarbon date ranges in CARD to generate a single curve that revealed how common C-14 dates were over time. At the time, CARD had about 25,000 records.
Because time periods with more people most likely produced more material that could be carbon-dated, the shape of the radiocarbon date curve gave the team an idea of when the population of North America increased and decreased.
They found that the population of North America increased rapidly around 50 B.C. and peaked around A.D. 1150. From that time until European contact, the Indigenous population may have been declining, possibly because of increased mortality from diseases like tuberculosis as people aggregated into denser settlements.
In a 2025 study, Kelly and colleagues created a radiocarbon date curve, which revealed a Native American population peak around A.D. 1150. (Image credit: Kelly et al. / PNAS)"The 1150 date was an interesting finding that also surprised us," Peros told Live Science. "I had assumed it would be more like 1500 just following the arrival of the Europeans."
In a 2025 study, Kelly and co-authors found a similar temporal peak. By that time, CARD's dataset had ballooned to over 100,000 dates, making the estimate more robust.
"Although devastated by European contact, the Indigenous population did not simply increase to a peak at 1500 CE and then decline," the researchers wrote in the study. In fact, they found evidence for a slight recovery in population numbers just prior to 1500.
But how large was that population? By combining the radiocarbon date curve with a starting population and factoring in average annual population growth, researchers can estimate the number of people living in North America around 1492, Peros said.
In their study, Peros and co-authors assumed that a handful of extended families — around 1,000 people — entered North America about 15,000 years ago as the founder population. With those inputs, the researchers estimated that the maximum population of North America was about 2.5 million in 1150 and had declined to about 1.8 million in 1492. But if people arrived significantly earlier than 15,000 years ago — which might be the case, given evidence from sites like White Sands in New Mexico, which dates to 23,000 years ago — or arrived in greater numbers, those population figures would be even higher.
"Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population," Kelly said. At that time, the city of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, encompassed 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) and had a population of nearly 20,000 people.
"They could have fielded thousands of warriors, and it would have been a very different experience for the Europeans," Kelly said. "It could have been a very different history."
Why does this matter?
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Experts told Live Science that the pre-1492 population of what is now the U.S. and Canada was between 2 million and 4 million. The archaeological deep dive in this region sets up the possibility that a full Western Hemisphere population estimate may be made someday.
Milner is optimistic they'll eventually get there. "Will it be done in my lifetime? Probably not," he said. "It's time-consuming, laborious and not especially flashy work to do."
Nonetheless, demography is important work, he said, because it can help us make estimates to prepare for the future.
"The world's population has more than doubled in my lifetime; that's unheard of in human existence," Milner said. "Environmental scientists are really trying to look at what's happened over long periods of time to give us a range of variation of what might happen in the future. We have to make some informed decisions about how to manage our landscape and accommodate these changes."
Understanding the number of Indigenous inhabitants in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 is also key to understanding the history of North America.
"North America was not an empty continent when the Europeans arrived," Peros said. "There were people and civilizations pretty much everywhere in the Americas for a long period of time. It is important for people to understand that when we talk about questions of reconciliation and when we do land acknowledgements."
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How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!
'> 'It could have been a very different history': Researchers are finally starting to pin down how many Indigenous people were living in the Americas...
Between violent extermination and peaceful absorption — with cultural exchange — prehistorians and others propose a wide range of theories to account for Neanderthals' extinction. Just as we've projected our concerns and anxieties about race and gender onto Neanderthals, so too do contemporary challenges shape how we imagine their extinction.
Sometimes it's the newspapers that translate a more neutral science into easily relatable headlines. "Immigrants Halt Neanderthal Era," announced the Glasgow Herald (29 July 2011), claiming that "Europe's earliest residents may have been crowded out by uncontrolled immigration 40,000 years ago." Glossing a highly technical study by Cambridge archaeologist Paul Mellars about the notable increase in population size during the Upper Palaeolithic, the news reports tweaked the science to speak to contemporary anxieties.
But often the science itself is framed or informed by current events. The pathogen thesis gained credence during and after the COVID-19 epidemic. A 2024 study of a 50,000-year-old case of herpes in a sequenced viral genome confirmed widespread speculation that Sapiens-borne pathogens were passed to a Neanderthal population without immunities. Jonathan Kennedy's popular world history "Pathogenesis" (Crown, 2023) argued that Homo sapiens would have been less vulnerable to Neanderthal diseases because they arrived in much larger numbers and had more evolved immune systems from their tropical environment.
Of growing importance over the last twenty years is the thesis that climate change, our own existential challenge of the Anthropocene, was the principal cause of Neanderthal extinction. The idea takes many shapes, beginning with an update of French geologist Georges Cuvier's "catastrophism," where species died off in cataclysmic geological events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Since 2007, researchers point to the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption near Naples (Italy), now dated to around 39,280 BP [before present] (+/- 110 years), fictionalised in the 2013 animated film The Croods.
Scientists argue that arriving Homo sapiens were not as affected, perhaps because there were fewer directly touched by the 120 cubic miles [500 cubic kilometers] of magma released, or perhaps because almost everyone died out — but waves of Sapiens arrived later. After all, while most of us share small parts of the Neanderthal genome, the lineages from which we 'directly' descend settled much later in Europe — long after the Ice Age. By far, the greatest portion of our genome comes from our Neolithic, not Palaeolithic, ancestors.
But perhaps "Climate Change Killed the Neanderthals," that is, the extreme climatic fluctuations during the Upper Pleistocene that National Geographic (9 February 2004) announced, following the work of an international team of thirty scientists who laboured for more than seven years on the study. The team identified a general climatic instability during the Middle Palaeolithic marked by a severe cooling event around 41,000 years ago, lasting six centuries — interstadials GIS 13 to 7 of the Greenland ice-core records, to be precise.
St. Michaels Cave in Gibraltar, which was used as a refuge for Neanderthals until around 40,000 years ago. (Image credit: UCG via Getty Images)For the last twenty years, scientists have sought to specify the timing, magnitude and ecological impact of a "mini-Ice Age" — the prehistorical obverse of global warming — that reduced vegetation and herbivore food sources, forcing Neanderthals towards warmer climates, including southern Spain. Clive Finlayson, trained as a zoologist, was an early contributor to sophisticated ecological modeling of Neanderthal extinction. At Gibraltar, he argued, "the last Neanderthal" could be found as late as 29,000 years ago, but there's competition for the title: elsewhere in the southern climatic refugium, Zafarraya (Granada) yielded a skeleton dated to 30,000 BP, but there are skeptics, while other candidates come from the Mezmaiskaya Caves in the Caucasus.
The trope, we've seen, is a frequent one in Neanderthal fiction, including Claire Cameron's "The Last Neanderthal" (Little Brown & Co., 2017), a moving, feminist revision of "Neanderthal Woman." It's also been widely used in popular nonfiction, including in Ludovic Slimak's 2023 account of twenty-five years of research in the Mandrin Cave .
Some of the science blaming climate change for the demise of Neanderthals marks a retreat from the recent archaeological rehabilitation of Neanderthals as a type of human equal to Homo sapiens, as these theories need to account for Sapiens' survival in the same severe conditions. Some experts rewrite basic wisdom, arguing that Neanderthals were not a cold-adapted species, since their origins lay during a warm interglacial stage (MIS 11); or that they lacked the technologies for making complex (and warm) clothing; or perhaps that their preexisting biological cold adaptations delayed the development of such technologies — a story about their technological inertia and deep conservatism.
That Neanderthals died out because of their conservatism, while humans alone mastered innovation, and with it, conquered the world, is the principal claim in Philip Lieberman's "The Unpredictable Species: What Makes Humans Unique" (Princeton University Press, 2013), and it's a widely shared belief.
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Aside from the fact that the high value placed on "innovation" corresponds to the ideological superstructure of contemporary neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, it seems fitting that Neanderthals died out because, in this view, they were, well, truly Neanderthal. The rhetorical figure returns to haunt the science: Neanderthals were conservative, backward, clinging mindlessly to the past in a changing world.
Neanderthal conservatism — not rhetorically, but as an original character trait — has origins in nineteenth-century anthropological judgements about "primitive" peoples. Augustus Pitt Rivers, an early innovator in British archaeology, underscored "the form of a persistent conservatism" of indigenous peoples, and quoted approvingly his colleague E. B. Tylor's "Primitive Culture" (1871): "The savage is firmly, obstinately conservative. No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence to the great precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his ancestors can control against the most obvious evidence of his own opinions and actions."
Just as "savages" were once seen as descendants of Neanderthals, so too is their conservatism a cultural legacy, even when anthropologists, transcending an outdated comparative method, no longer deem them ancestral, or even savage.
NEANDERTHALS AMONG US: The Making of a Prehistoric Human by Peter Sahlins is published by Oneworld, hardback £28.
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Harvard University Press
Neanderthals Among Us: the Making of a Prehistoric Human
In "Neanderthals Among Us," historian Peter Sahlins offers a sweeping interdisciplinary history of an obsession that has made Neanderthals into a distorting mirror of our claims to human uniqueness and our anxieties about human difference.
At their discovery, Neanderthals helped invent prehistory itself, saturated with racial science; initially cast as ugly, stupid, and hairy, they underwent a long and uneven rehabilitation, with science and popular culture moving at different speeds, and sometimes in opposite directions.
The reputation of “Neanderthal Man,” our Paleolithic double, has been in constant flux, remaining a site of endless fascination and debate about human uniqueness, race, gender, and the very look of the human.
'> 'News reports tweaked the science to speak to contemporary anxieties': How Neanderthal extinction is a projection of our own, modern fears