[orionblamblam]

> The representation almost looks "human."

It's also very, very white (I thought it looked like a mildly cute Irish girl with a broad nose). One wonders whether the "Tut was a black man!" crowd will decide they'd rather Neanderthals were white, black, brown or "other."

[My2Cents]

I don't know why the artist chose red hair, but the freckles and light skin are probably from the discovery of Neanderthal remains in northern Europe. The point, I think, is that those that study these things tend to impose their own prejudices upon what they are studying, particularly in how they repesent what they looked like.

[Rytwyng]

The representation almost looks "human."

It's also very, very white

Well.... they did live in a glacial climate, for a lot longer than Caucasoids did. And some Neanderthal bones bore suggestions of rickets, suggesting that vitamin D was in short supply -- which would definitely cause selection for lighter skin colors.

It could be argued that blond/red hair, blue eyes, and fair skin tones got into the modern population via a very small amount of gene flow from Neanderthals -- who had a much longer time to accumulate the necessary mutations. The red hair gene is estimated to be 100,000 years old, and there are a few recorded cases (Spain and Israel) of Neanderthal-modern hybrid skeletons, so such a transfer could have happened. Once these genes entered the modern population, the glacial climate could have rapidly selectively amplified them, "whitening" the incoming moderns very rapidly.

Of course neither mitochondria nor y-chromosome haplotypes show any evidence of Neanderthal mixture, but, if the admixture was at a very low percentage to begin with, the scarce Neanderthal haplotypes could easily have been wiped out during the population bottlenecks of the last glacial maximum.

[Gumlegs]

One wonders whether the "Tut was a black man!" crowd will decide they'd rather Neanderthals were white, black, brown or "other."

Paisley.