Just noshing the other night watching this film, which came out in 2006, and is probably still available for rental or at your public library. A and E's THE FATE OF THE NEANDERTHALS, narrated by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, is the kind of educational film I enjoy. Several important professors of anthropology and archeology speak, and here is the consensus:
Neanderthals had very difficult lives. They usually lived to about 40, but this was enough time for some of them to have grandchildren. The men were buried with grave goods like weapons and flowers, the women were never buried with anything. This reflects a lack of status, possibly even a belief that women did not have an afterlife and suggests women were not respected in life. It is also possible that women and children lived separate of men for long periods of time. There is evidence that Neanderthals lived in small groups, and there were probably never more than 100,000 living at any one time. Their range based on burials and other evidence includes Israel and Iran, the British isles, and sweep of Mediterranean Europe. Since they treated each other differently than they treated most animals, they probably had a sense of themselves as special and different, and they may have had a concept of religiousness or worshipped a deity.
They were alive when Homo Sapiens emerged and the two groups probably encountered each other and recognized each other as both different and as people. Physically they were very robust, men with the strength of about 3 times that of modern man.
