Excerpts from an article published on the BBC News web site on 10th February 2005:

In 1848, a strange skull was discovered on the military outpost of Gibraltar.

The remains were named Homo neanderthalensis – or Neanderthal Man – an ancient and primitive form of human.

But was Neanderthal really the brutish ape-man of legend, or an effective rival to our own species? And how exactly had he been driven to extinction?

This week’s Horizon programme brings together a team of leading experts to see just what we could find out about this remarkable creature, from the bones themselves. But to begin we needed a skeleton, and no complete Neanderthal has ever been found.

However, Gary Sawyer, a reconstruction expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, US, realised that enough partial skeletons existed to create an entire composite skeleton from casts of the fragments.

Read the full article...