In March 2021, the United States was beginning to emerge from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to what he thought was the premature easing of mask-wearing requirements in Texas and Mississippi, newly elected President Joe Biden complained about "e;Neanderthal thinking"e;. This earned him a rebuke from Germany's Neanderthal Museum, but Biden was hardly the first politician to liken his opponents to Neanderthals. The term 'Neanderthal' has been used in a negative context for decades.This 14k word short read asks the question, why do Neanderthals get such a bad rap from politicians and in the media? To find the answers, we investigate the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossils in the mid-nineteenth century and how they were eventually recognised as belonging to a completely new human species, Homo neanderthalensis, named after the discovery site in Neander Thal (Neander Valley), near Düsseldorf, Germany.Nineteenth century texts show that Neanderthals were studied in the context of then-current (and long-discredited) views about 'race'. The reputation of Neanderthals further suffered when French anthropologist Marcellin Boule published an influential study of a well-preserved skeleton of an elderly male from La Chapelle-aux-Saints and failed to recognise that his stooped posture was due to age-related osteoarthritis.How all of this came about, how Neanderthal reputations have slowly recovered, how it has been shown that they certainly were not dimwits, and how they live on in present-day populations, is the subject of this work.This is the sixth work in the In Search of series of eBook Short Reads.*** This and the other 11 short reads in the In search of series are available in a single collection: Prehistoric Investigations 2: In Search of ***
