The Sunday Read: ‘Neanderthals Were People, Too’

In the summer of 1856, workers quarrying limestone in a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, found an odd looking skull. It was elongated and almost chinless. William King, a British geologist, suspected that this was not merely the remains of an atypical human, but belonged to a typical member of an alternate humanity. He named the species Homo neanderthalensis: Neanderthal man. Guided by racism and phrenology, he deemed the species brutish, with a “moral ‘darkness.’” It was a label that stuck. Recently, however, after we’d snickered over their skulls for so long, it became clear we had made presumptions. Neanderthals weren’t the slow-witted louts we’d imagined them to be.