New Neanderthal

On the right is a reconstruction of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neandertal skeleton, discovered in France in 1908, published in L'Illustration in 1909, and in the Illustrated London News about a week later. It was done by Frantisek Kupka, based on the work of Marcellin Boule. Monsieur Marcellin Boule was a fossil expert. He had the full skeleton before him. He knew that the gentleman Neanderthal had a larger brain than he did, yet in his description he created an ape. Why?












This is a reconstruction by Jay Matternes, from the October issue of Science, 1981. It's from the same skull. This man looks powerful, pleasant, bright. There's a difference. Why?
















And this incidentally, is a fully authoritive, fully authentic reconstruction of the average Neanderthal female. Vive la difference.






And now to numbers, without which there is not science. The graph is from McHenry. I know nothing about him other than that he has published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science. That should mean that academically he's at least within the range of the socially acceptable, so I'll take his data points as being accurate:


Graph from McHenry (1994), plotting brainsizes against time:
(Note: I can not get my blog to take text below the graph, so unfortunately, see New Neanderthal, Continued.)