Them + Us

I am tired of the media posting human-like images of Neanderthals and melting down over their “love affairs” with our species.
First of all, these facial reconstructions are based on techniques and artistic traditions developed for modern humans, so they are mostly useless. We have no idea what Neanderthals looked like, but they were certainly very much unlike us: they had different growth trajectory, different physiology, different brain structure, massive bones and muscles, likely better night vision, probably a lot more body hair, and certainly a myriad other differences we are not aware of. There is plenty of evidence that their faces were a lot more ape-like than usually portrayed.
Second, the way we inherited their genes tells with brutal certainty how it happened. There are very few Neanderthal genes in our X chromosomes, meaning that it was always Neanderthal males mating with our females. Anthropologists know very well what it means: such pattern is observed after invasions and conquest where native males get killed and females raped.
That’s probably what our initial contact with them was like. Later our species, which was a generalist while they were specialized big game hunters, overwhelmed them with advanced technology such as atlatls and bows, starved them by driving large mammals to extinction, and ultimately killed them all, jus like it killed all other hominids.
A while ago, Danny Vendramini published a book titled Them + Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. That was just before the presence of Neanderthal genes in our genome became known, but he guessed a lot of this. Unfortunately, he pushed his theory way too far, so the book wasn’t taken seriously. But I suspect he was right about a lot of things.