“They may well have been capable of speech (crows, African grey parrots, and Southern Grackles are all speech capable), but they were not related to us at all. Their DNA is halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee and there is no reason to believe that any other hominid ever had DNA closer to ours than that.”
Pure BS! Actual recreations have them looking like a mean looking version of us. Give him a haircut and a suit, and he’d take your job. Not only that, but it has already been shown that they interbred with us, leaving the vast majority of us with Neanderthal somewhere in our ancestry.
And for the record, individual Chimpanzees from different troops are far more different from EACH OTHER than we are from Neanderthals.