The wrong question

It is hard to believe that opinions about any fossil sample could vary as wildly and completely as opinions about Neandertals and their place in human evolution (compare Wolpoff et al. 2004 & Tattersall 2002). The Neandertal sample is more than adequate, and evolutionary theory is the universally held explanatory principle, so there must be more to the story. Part of this is the role Neandertals have come to play in our culture, but even this post-modernist explanation will not suffice. The most compelling explanation of how Neandertal studies landed in so deep a quagmire is that in determining how different Neandertals were from the human condition, the wrong question was being asked.