Kyle Jarrard of the Huffington Post visits the current science about Neandertals, with a nice piece focusing on David Frayer's work: "Neanderthals getting a colorful upgrade".
No more can we say that old Neanderthal -- prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts -- didn't know what he was doing. And no more can we deny it: They were not a little bit like us but a lot. As Professor David Frayer, Neanderthal expert at the University of Kansas, puts it, with not a little hint of told-you-so scientific glee, "Seemingly with every new journal issue, the gap between Neanderthal and modern human behavior closes."
I should say that our idea of Neandertal ancestry in recent humans is about to get an upgrade, too...