Neanderthals didn’t have big faces with jutting features – that’s just the prejudice of us short-faced humans. Erik Trinkaus at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has studied the faces of a range of skulls, from 1.5-million-year-old Homo erectus, through Neanderthal samples from 200,000 to 30,000 years ago, to recent specimens from around the world.
The Neanderthals did not have unusually long faces, says Trinkaus. In fact, their faces were similar to those of their non-Neanderthal Homo ancestors, perhaps even slightly shorter, and only a little longer than those of early modern humans. It is the shorter faces of…
