Their very name has become a byword for all that is brutish, stupid and crude. In the popular imagination, these were the violent, shambling, grunting apemen of legend. If you accuse someone of being a Neanderthal, you are not paying them a compliment. But Neanderthal Man, who represented one of the oddest and most mysterious chapters in the history of humanity, has been undergoing something of a makeover in recent years. We now know that these extinct cousins were not the brutes of legend but a sophisticated and intelligent species, capable of creating fire, fashioning delicate tools, burying their dead...