I'm reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as well as more idiosyncratic ideas. This is mostly pre-1960 stuff for the time being.
To the extent that old ideas are wrong it is no surprise: Science progresses by rejecting wrong ideas, and paleoanthropologists of the past lacked the luxury of today's data. To the extent that the ideas look familiar, they remind us that our current hypotheses in many instances echo ideas that were advanced fifty years ago or more.
Weckler's model
A bit off the mainstream was a paper published by Joseph E. Weckler [1], titled "The relationships between Neanderthal Man and Homo sapiens." Weckler was a cultural anthropologist who had done fieldwork in the American Southwest and the South Pacific [2]. He wrote only one paper on Neandertals but this received substantial attention, first published in the American Anthropologist and later revised in a simplified version for Scientific American. Weckler was very interested in the migration and dispersal of ancient populations, maybe because of his work on the ethnography of the South Pacific. He brought that perspective to the Neandertals and other ancient groups.