I’m unimpressed.
After starting off with the superimposition of a skull of an upright hominid onto the head of a forward-leaning gorilla, the whole recreation just goes downhill.
Besides the base of the skull being the wrong shape for a gorilla-type creature, the addition of the jaw would place portions of that skull outside the gorilla head. A Neanderthal skull isn’t all that different from a modern human skull.
The full body recreations look more like models considered for the representation of Gollum in Lord of the Rings than they do to any kind of primate, human or not.
Neanderthal rib cages just keep flaring outwards as you get lower and they apparently really did stand and walk hunched over a bit.
Thanks all. This Aussie stuff is entirely invented by the author, and isn’t based on morphology. It’s more like something Virchow would have come up with if he were still alive. He kept getting crazier with his denials and finally reached the point where he said the Neander fossils were of a 17th century Cossack with rickets who’d stripped naked and hid in a cave where he’d died.
From the depictions down through the decades, Neandertal in a suit:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol306/issue5693/images/small/40-1-thumb.gif
muawiyah, not needles, but I came across Neandert-awls while looking for the suit pic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol306/issue5693/images/small/40-2-thumb.gif
sadponies, another “wilma” pic:
http://www.philipsonphotography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/MG_0182-1-950x633.jpg
