Revision

Pictured: Homo neanderthalensis confronts humans with shirts.

In my young days the Neanderthals were primitives without language or culture who radiated into Europe before being overrun and wiped out by our ancestors; unsurprisingly as they were nasty, brutish and short, and no good to be said for them.

No language because they had no hyoid bones. True, only a few chunky pieces of skull and long bone had been found at the time, but no hyoids and therefore no language or anything that goes with that.

Humans definitely did not interbreed with them, no siree, fastidiousness in matters of mating being a characteristic of the Homo sapiens of course.

Today, after the discovery of a hyoid at Kebara in Israel, some apparent settlements and a few smeary bits of "art", they are pictured as a cross between Noble Savage and Eco Warrior, who would undoubtedly have opposed Brexit and Capitalism, re-nationalised the railways and so forth, given the option.

The few percent of Neanderthal genes found in Europeans, Western Russians and their descendants is cited as proof of local interbreeding and proposed as the likely cause of smoking, alcoholism and other such defects: it doesn't seem to sit well with us. This explains why alcoholism and chain-smoking are unknown in Asia or Africa.