Neanderthals Shed the 'Dumb Brute' Label as Wood Tools and Brain Studies Revise the Picture

In February 1916, National Geographic ran a description of Neanderthals written by Theodore Roosevelt. He called them squat, burly, big-headed, thick-skulled savages with bent knees, jutting brows and almost no chin. Their brains, he wrote, were of good size, but the parts tied to higher intellectual attainment were poorly developed. An illustrator named Knight supplied the matching imagery.

National Geographic science editor Nicholas St. Fleur has since written that Roosevelt and Knight were echoing the scientific mood of their day, when Neanderthals were seen as dumb and brutish. That image, he notes, has dogged Homo neanderthalensis in varying degrees since the species was first found in 1856. Roosevelt's piece appeared in a story published October 8, 2026, titled "Stones & Bones."

Popular culture helped lock the picture in. Historian of science Peter Sahlins, author of the forthcoming Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human, points to H. G. Wells. In The Outline of History and the short story The Grisly Folk, both from the early 1920s, Wells drew Neanderthals as ugly, inarticulate, lumbering creatures to be beaten by true humans. That set the template for films and novels through the twentieth century.

The brute theory did not last a hundred years. Researchers later learned that Neanderthals, who have since died out as a distinct group, share almost all their DNA with living humans, and that they behaved much like other humans of their era.

The latest evidence comes from Spain, where wooden tools dated to between 62,000 and 40,000 years ago turned up preserved in stone. Jacek Krywko reported the find in Ars Technica on October 9, 2026. The choice of wood points to knowledge. Scots pine is easy to work and dries quickly, so tools were cheap to make and replace. Juniper's fibrous bark suited the trays. Firewood tended to be dry, while tools were cut from fresh wood. M. Gemma Chacón says that hunting for wood resembled hunting for stone: they knew what they wanted to make. That implies planning, she says, and some brain complexity to organize activities. Her summary: Neanderthals are no longer seen as Homo sapiens' dumb cousins.

A skull-based analysis of Neanderthal brains, covered in the July 20 edition of Scientific American, suggests their range of intelligence largely overlapped with ours. The commentary's author puts it this way: 110 years after Roosevelt, Neanderthals seem to get smarter every time they are dug up.

The record also shows how hard their lives could be. Cambridge researchers report a round hole in the shoulder blade of a Neanderthal whose partial remains were found in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. It may be the earliest known case of lethal violence between individuals with a wooden spear in the hominin fossil record. The scapula is about 75,000 years old. Dr Emma Pomeroy, the study's lead author in Cambridge's Department of Archaeology, said such bones are so thin that complete ones are often missing even from modern burials. The team lifted it out in one piece from under almost eight metres of rock and sediment. Fred Lewsey described the work for Cambridge on October 15, 2026.

The commentary then turns to a larger argument. Dave Coppedge of Creation-Evolution Headlines reads the 1916 episode as evidence of unquestioning faith in human evolution, noting that every pillar of support from that year has since been demolished. He wonders how much of today's proof will be shown false later. The author adds a related point: the human mind has no history of its own. Evidence, whether a fatal spear wound or the Venus of Hohle Fels (about 40,000 BCE), arrives without footnotes, so claims about the mind's evolution are largely imagination.

Most of the technologies we use to measure intelligence, the author notes, came after metalworking. A brilliant person twenty thousand years ago, with no hammer, nail, microscope or telescope, could live and die without leaving a trace in the non-living world. That, the author concludes, is a hard limit on what can be known about where the human mind came from. Note that this is an opinion piece from a Discovery Institute-affiliated outlet.