The Neandertals were ancient humans who lived in Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and Europe before around 40,000 years ago. Archaeologists have been very active in Europe for more than 150 years, and this has led to many discoveries of Neandertal skeletal remains and material culture.

Today scientists know from ancient DNA evidence that all living people can trace a small proportion of their ancestry to this ancient group. However, Neandertal skeletons have many distinctive features that are rare or absent from other human populations. By studying these skeletal traits, anthropologists try to understand the lifeways of Neandertals and the evolutionary history that made them different in many ways from people today.

This virtual lab includes three well-known crania of European Neandertals. All three of them represent individuals that lived between around 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. Two of them, La Quina 5 and La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, are from southern France. The other, Monte Circeo 1, is from Italy. The three skulls are all from adults. In addition, the lab includes one model of a recent human skull.

These three Neandertals are not identical to each other, they manifest some variation, both in their preservation and in the anatomy that is present. Where the bone is preserved, each fossil presents some of the distinctive features of Neandertal skulls.

• Occipital bun. The posterior part of Neandertal skulls projects toward the rear, giving the skull an elongated shape. In French, this form became known as a chignon, the word for a hair bun, and so in English this is called the occipital bun. The bun is often defined by a flattened profile above and below, and on both sides when viewed from above.
• Barrel-shaped vault. When viewed from behind, Neandertal skulls have a circular profile, with their maximum width approximately halfway up the sides of the skull.
• Small mastoid processes. The mastoid processes are downward-projecting extensions of the temporal bone, just behind the ears. In Neandertal skulls, these are small and do not project far, while in today's humans they are often larger and more projecting.
• Supraorbital torus. The browridge is uniformly thick from the center of the skull out to the lateral edge of the eye orbits, and arches over each orbit.
• Midfacial prognathism.Neandertal faces project forward from the nose down to the jaw. As a result, their cheekbones are angled when viewed from above or below, the middle of the face being more anterior than the sides.

Materials in this lab

• La Quina 5 is from La Quina rock shelter in southern France. The original fossil is curated at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France. The model in this virtual lab relies upon data from a cast in the Biological Anthropology Laboratory, University of Wisconsin--Madison.
• La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 is curated at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France. The model in this virtual lab relies upon data from a cast in the Biological Anthropology Laboratory, University of Wisconsin--Madison.
• The original Monte Circeo 1 fossil is curated at the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, Rome, Italy. The model in this virtual lab relies upon data from a cast in the Biological Anthropology Laboratory, University of Wisconsin--Madison.
• The model of the human calvaria is based on an anatomical model created by Hannah Newey. The model is available on Sketchfab with a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. I reduced the polygon count of the model for this virtual lab.

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