Yes, it was a Scientific American article many years ago now : somewhere in Belgium or thereabouts they found both neanderthal bones and antler-tools in a tin mine, cassiterite, as you say, was what they were after for smelting. That in turn means that they weren't quite as dumb as they've often been portrayed. As to speech, the absense of the hypoloid throat bone is supposedly evidence that they couldn't speak like we do(spectrum of voice sounds), but look at the arabic languages : they communicate with hand/body gestures as much as with the spoken word.......Then look at the Basque language, unrelated to any other language(Lapp language too). Now if it's true that the last neanderthals died out in and around Gibraltar circa 19,000 years ago, could it be that spanish Basque is somehow a daughter language? This is speculative of course : homo sap has been traced to about 125,000 BC, to the original "eve". We even see the tabu volcano/nuclear winter in our "squeezed" mitochondrial DNA at 74,000 BC. So suppose that a DNA breakthrough occurred somewhere between 35,000 BC and 20,000 BC : homo sap and neanderthal COULD mate. Too late for the neanderthal genes to be spread throughout the entire homo sap population due mostly to "ogre" fears/cultural differences, like copulating with a monkey to homo sap, but a remnant population of mixed genes developed the Basque language as distinct from all other languages. Has anyone ever looked closely at Basque DNA?
"Then look at the Basque language, unrelated to any other language(Lapp language too). Now if it's true that the last neanderthals died out in and around Gibraltar circa 19,000 years ago, could it be that spanish Basque is somehow a daughter language?....Has anyone ever looked closely at Basque DNA? "
There have been a lot of posts on the GGG list about a possible Basque link to the Celts, IIRC. Blam or SunkenCiv could help you on this one. They're both veritable fonts of knowledge in this area! :)
They have discovered a Neanderthal 'speech' bone. So, most agree now that they could talk,albeit in a high pitch if I remember correctly.