The first Neanderthal skull was actually found in Gibraltar, some 8 years before the Neander Valley find, that a name was suggested, but that its remarkable meaning was not realized and the skull was put away in a cupboard until news of the German discovery broke

As the skull was generally longer and wider, the average cranial capacity of the Neanderthals is found to be slightly larger than that of modern humans; 1500 c.c. compared to 1375 c.c. We can't necessarily say that the Neanderthals were smarter because they had bigger brains

The name "Neanderthal" is now applied to a group of fossil hominids which share certain features in common and which are known to have lived during a fairly short period of time in our not-too-distant past. Most Neanderthals have been discovered in Europe, but some have also been found in Iraq and Russia.

What we don't know is if the two groups of peoples communicated with each other, traded, fought or even interbred. We can't even be sure that the Neanderthals were just a separate sub-species to modern humans. Some people think they were others think they were a completely separate species. Generally speaking, the "separate sub-species" point of view is the more accepted one, making the Neanderthals; Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that they may have been dumber than the modern humans who lived at the same time as they did. In any c

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