style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">To call someone a Neanderthal is scarcely polite. We think of Neanderthals as shambling, brutish semi-humans from long ago. No wonder, then, that when it was recently found that between 1 per cent and 4 per cent of the genes of modern Europeans and Asians had a Neanderthal origin there was surprise, if not disbelief. This only increased when it was also shown that their brains were considerably larger than ours.