"Until we stop thinking of Neandertals as a bush-league version of ourselves, thinking of them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, we'll never dignify them in an appropriate way as an evolutionary entity in their own right, with their own evolutionary history," [Ian Tattersal] said. "Neandertals did very well for hundreds of thousands of years, and were very adaptable. They probably did the maximum that could be done with intuitive thinking. I just don't think they had the ability to think symbolically."