CLUMSY, stupid brutes with little in the way of developed culture. That harsh view of our sister species Homo neanderthalis is being tempered by findings suggesting that they were often forced to make the best of a desperately tough life.
A team led by Antonio Rosas of Spain’s National Museum for Natural Sciences in Madrid studied 43,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidrón cave in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The teeth of eight individuals from El Sidrón examined by the team showed evidence that during growth they had probably gone through a period of starvation (…
