Typically, the mention of our Neanderthal ancestors brings to mind images of primitive, grunting proto-humans, the kind who hunted savagely before clubbing a female over the head to drag her back to the cave. According to research from Colorado University at Boulder, that just isn’t true: Neanderthals had just as much cognitive horsepower as their “modern” successors – they just lived in a different time.

To challenge the prevailing notions, Paola Villa and co-author Wil Roebroeks tested about a dozen hypotheses that suggested neanderthals were inferior in terms of communication, tools and diet diversity. Once their research was complete, the facts just didn’t lie – not only were none of the inferiority hypotheses upheld, but none of them could explain neanderthals’ extinction.

“The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there,” said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. “What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true.”

In contrast, they found that neanderthals indeed hunted in groups, herding hundreds of buffalo over long distances to their eventual death at the bottom of a sinkhole. This implies the capability to plan ahead and communicate. They also found, using fossil teeth and food remains, that neanderthals in fact ate a diverse diet, dispelling the myth that they subsisted on nothing but meat cooked crudely over an open flame. Villa believes that many of these interpretations have to do with the fact that neanderthals lived entire era’s before modern humans flourished, thanks in part to the emergence of new technologies.

“Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors,” Villa said. “It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari and conclude that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari.”

Researchers still aren’t sure of why exactly neanderthals died off, but they believe it has less to do with inferiority and more to do with circumstances. As neanderthals interbred with their modern successors, the resulting males may have been less fertile. They also lived in small groups, making it easier for modern humans to squeeze them out and isolate them as their population boomed.

Neanderthals – call them what you want, just don’t call them dumb.