I would ask anyone interested to honestly ask themselves how Neanderthals were presented to them. Were they presented as subhuman, or as just people?
Honestly? As subhuman caveman who grunted, carried clubs and dressed in clothes - violent and stupid.
However these representations were always given to me by the media not by scientists.
The first scientific representations I remember coming across depicted Neanderthals as being humanish in some traits but lacking in others. They were certainly not "just people". There's a lot of speculation, of course, but the accounts I've read have always been careful to seperate the evidence and the deductions. (For example, that they dead have apparently been burried is evidence but that they had religion is a deduction - that they used primitive stone tools notably inferior to those of Cro Magnon man is evidence but that this means they were either less intelligent or less creative than modern humans is deduction).
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