I'm just glad that the dumb idea that Neanderthals were dumb, club carrying knuckledraggers is finally being laid to rest. I hope we eventually learn what happened to them. They survived the choke point of 75,000 years ago only to disappear 30,000 years later. So cool to put a face to the name :-)

> Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life.

This surprised me enough to scroll back up and look at the reconstruction again, because it looks the woman definitely has (what I would think of as) a chin--which supports the "not so stark in real life" part. But if the skulls are that different, how would a Neanderthal face end up looking so similar to a human's? Did they have cartilage or something that doesn't get preserved in these skeletal remains?

Whatever the differences, they would have been attractive enough to Homo Sapiens to breed with.

Maybe not willingly, though. Look up Danny Vendramini's neanderthal predation theory, and consider that modern X chromosomes carry no neanderthal DNA, indicating that all interbreeding involved neanderthal males and human females.

> consider that modern X chromosomes carry no neanderthal DNA, indicating that all interbreeding involved neanderthal males and human females

This is a false implication, it’s possible that Neanderthal X chromosome just doesn’t “play nice” with human dna, and can’t result in fertile offspring. Admittedly I have not read the sources you recommend, so maybe they address this?

Or Neanderthal women lived with their tribe and their hybrid children died with that Neanderthal tribe, whereas modern human women and their hybrid children (or at least the ones who have living descendants) lived with modern human tribes and had a better chance of survival.

They had no privacy laws in the Paleolithic era, so this sort of doxxing is totally legit. Neanderthals cannot simply rely on the flesh being gone and bone being replaced by stone to conceal their faces.

I'm skeptical. Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit? Or is it pseudoscience?

> Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit?

What did you search for when you tried to verify this yourself?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxUyd3CgrE

Aside, a similar approach was used in a MacGyver episode nearly 40 years ago ("The Secret of Parker House"):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638792/mediaviewer/rm119321036...

It’s legit in the sense that they use this originally in forensics to reconstruct faces I think , say a victim or unknown so they can put out a search pamphlet.

They know the relative muscular thickness for each area as to compile a likeness. Is it 100% a look-a-like? Probably not, but the main features and composition should be comparable to the original face.

I'm not sure about how much we know of musculature and fat layers of neanderthals. Working from skeletons of non-humans can be really fraught.

Neanderthals are humans.

Neanderthals are a distinct species. If "human" in the context you are using it is confined to Homo sapiens then no, Neanderthals are not human. If your definition of human is anything in the genus homo then yes, Neanderthals are human.

I'm not sure what would be "pseudo-science" about it, but it is as legit as it can be. Reconstruction of a face from a skull is possible, but the goal is not to create an image that's indistinguishable from a hypothetical photograph of the subject. Rather, the intent is to form a general idea of what people of the time period would have looked like. Facial reconstruction is guided by current understanding of anatomy, musculature, aging processes, etc. Muscles and skin are attached to the skull based on modern human and primate anatomy, so what we get is a plausible representation of what someone with this exact skull shape may have looked like. Like with the dinosaurs, we cannot be 100% certain what the superficial exterior features looked like exactly. But, unlike with the dinosaurs, we know neanderthals are very closely related to modern humans, so we have a much more reasonable base to start from, as we can assume their facial muscles, skin, hair etc. would be similar to humans, but with different proportions. Plenty of real science goes into the process.