There is also a school of thought that says they were fully human...with rickets.
“There is also a school of thought that says they were fully human...with rickets.”
Please provide a source. As I understand it, this “school of thought” stems from a certain learned Dr. Virchow — who died in 1902! — and is based on his comments made over forty years before that when the first scant few Neanderthal remains were discovered in 1856. My 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the “rickets” theory was exploded in the following years when more fossil material was discovered, showing that the Neanderthal body type was characteristic and not the result of disease. Besides, rickets wouldn’t produce the robust bone structure and brow ridges. To put it gently, this “rickets” idea to explain Neanderthals was already long obsolete a hundred years ago when the Britannica dismissed it.