Scientists are showing Neanderthals some love. This is new, and required them to overcome some unscientific prejudices. It was only a few years ago that many anthropologists insisted that Neanderthals can't possibly have contributed to human ancestry because they were too ugly to appeal sexually to their modern human contemporaries.
Wrong. DNA evidence showed six years ago that many ancestors of modern humans made love with Neanderthals. Scientists now know in some detail how sex with Homo neanderthalensis contributed to the gene pool of today's Homo sapiens.
Yet our Pleistocene cousins still have an image problem and scientists deserve much of the blame, said John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin anthropologist who has been one of their leading defenders in blog posts dubbed the Neanderthal Anti Defamation Files. Not only were they complicit in the ugliness frame-up, they also had deemed Neanderthals stupid. That doesn't look smart now.