I had one course in college (Man in the Pleistocene) and continue to read popular literature, but am in no way competent to understand what is wrong with the arguments advanced by Vendramini.
I mean, it looks plausible to me."
Nor am I an expert, but those Vendramini images are not even remotely "plausible", and here's why:
- First and most obvious there's no way that, after hundreds of thousands of years living up north, Neanderthals were still black.
- Vendramini's inhuman facial expressions are obviously intended to frighten more than enlighten.
- Recent DNA analysis shows some levels of interbreeding between humans & Neanderthals -- which tells us they cannot possibly have been so very different from ourselves.
Further, it suggests that the side which captured women and kept their babies was not the Neanderthals. - Finally, photos of more serious scientific efforts to reconstruct Neanderthals' appearance, show them far more sympathetically and realistically.
So those Vendranamini images seem obvious anti-Neanderthal propaganda, doubtless intended to suggest there is no way interbreeding happened, or if it did, that the resulting hybrids were decidedly in-human.
Neither supposition seems realistic to me.
Some comparisons of Vendramini versus other representations of Neanderthals vs early humans:
