Neanderthals in popular culture

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Depictions of Neanderthals in popular culture have tended to greatly exaggerate the ape-like gait and related characteristics of the Neanderthals. It has been determined that some of the earliest specimens found in fact suffered from severe arthritis. The Neanderthals were fully bipedal and had a slightly larger average brain capacity than a typical modern human, though it is thought the brain structure was organised differently.

In popular idiom the word neanderthal is sometimes used as an insult, to suggest that a person combines a deficiency of intelligence and an attachment to brute force, as well as perhaps implying the person is old fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as "dinosaur" or "Yahoo" is also used. Counterbalancing this are sympathetic literary portrayals of Neanderthals, as in the novel The Inheritors by William Golding and Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, or the more serious treatment by palaeontologist Björn Kurtén, in several works including Dance of the Tiger, and British psychologist Stan Gooch in his hybrid-origin theory of humans.

A popular series of television advertisements by GEICO have modernized Neanderthals upset at the "racist" depictions of them as "cave-men" and the provocative slogan: "So easy even a cave-man can do it!"

Science fiction has depicted Neanderthals in several ways:

• Hindu Epic Ramayana mentions human-like apes and bears resembling Neanderthals.
• In The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov, a Neanderthal child is brought into the present via time travel.
• Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike" uses as a plot device the discovery of a Neanderthal skull in the United States. Neanderthal were also shown as living in primitive towns in the rural areas of the former United States in his book The Simulacra
• A Neanderthal named Java appeared as a supporting character in the adventures of Metamorpho the Element Man by DC Comics. He was inspired by the Java Man.
• In the Riverworld series, Philip José Farmer introduces a prominent Neanderthal character named Kazz, who interacts with modern humans. Jose Farmer's novella The Alley Man concerns a Neanderthal whose family has survived into modern times.
• Michael Crichton's 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead places a small Neanderthal population in Europe as the source of the battles recorded in Beowulf.
• Neanderthals appear as characters in Jean M. Auel's "Earth's Children" Series, including the 1986 movie adaptation of the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear
• A main character in Alfredo Castelli's comic book Martin Mystère is a Neanderthal called Java. Martin Mystère found him in Mongolia, home to the last population of Neanderthals. He is named after the Java Man remains.
• Colin Wilson discusses evidence and theories of Neanderthal survival into the modern age, including the possibility of their recent breeding with humans, in his book "Unsolved Mysteries". He notes that Stan Gooch holds the theory that the Jews are the modern descendants of the Neanderthal (while pointing out that Gooch, himself, is a Jew).
• In the 1989 Doctor Who serial Ghost Light a Neanderthal named Nimrod is a butler. He shows good intelligence throughout the serial. Neanderthals also appear in the 2005 New Series Adventures spin-off novel Only Human where they also show good intelligence but struggle with concepts such as fiction and lies, and they appear to not understand why humans 'are always making things up'
• Harry Harrison describes a Neanderthal population in Norway and Sweden in his Alternate History "Hammer and the Cross" series. In these books, Neanderthals hybridize with H. sapiens and are the basis for troll legends.
• The short-lived animated series "Cro" centered around a Cro-Magnon child being adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals.
• In John Darnton's 1996 novel Neanderthal a group of surviving Neanderthals is discovered in the mountains of Afghanistan. In the novel Neanderthals are said to possess the ability to read minds due to their larger cranial capacity.
• In The Silk Code by Paul Levinson (winner of 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel), Neanderthals are still living in Basque country in 750 AD, and a few survive in the present world.
• The T'lan Imass characters in the anthropologically-rooted fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen appear to be physiologically based on the Neanderthals.
• Neanderthals are portrayed as having been brought back from extinction to fill low paying jobs in Jasper Fforde's novel Lost in a Good Book, as well as later novels in the series.
• Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy portrays contact with an alternate world where Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant species. The first book in this series, Hominids, won the Hugo Award in 2003. (Sawyer's 1997 novel Frameshift used Neanderthal DNA as an element of a plot set in modern-day America.)
• In Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear (winner of 2003 Nebula Award), a phenomenon which caused the Neanderthals to die off now threatens modern humans.
• Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Origin prominently features Neanderthals from an alternate timeline.
• The novel Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen features spacefaring Neanderthals who were removed from Earth by powerful aliens for unspecified reasons.