Neanderthals in popular culture

Neanderthals have been portrayed in popular culture including appearances in literature, visual media and comedy, often in unflattering and inaccurate light.thumb|A reconstruction of a Neanderthal male at Although they are frequently characterized in an unflattering manner, research showing Neanderthals were as intelligent as contemporaneous Homo sapiens, with early stone tool technologies of comparable efficiency, is debunking long-held beliefs.Science Daily,

Negative portrayals

In popular idiom the word Neanderthal is sometimes used as an insult, to suggest that a person combines a deficiency in intelligence and a propensity toward brute force, as well as perhaps implying that the person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as "dinosaur" or "Yahoo" is also used.

Positive portrayals

There are sympathetic literary portrayals of Neanderthals, as in the novel The Inheritors by William Golding, Isaac Asimov's The Ugly Little Boy, or the more serious treatment by Finnish palaeontologist Björn Kurtén, in several works including Dance of the Tiger, and British psychologist Stan Gooch in his hybrid-origin theory of humans.

The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy of science fiction novels dealing with Neanderthals, written by Robert J. Sawyer, explores a scenario where Neanderthals are seen as a distinct species from humans and survive in a parallel universe version of earth. The novels explore what......
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