A catalogue of Neandertal sites. Technical Report

What is a Neandertal? Would it, by any other name, sound as sweet? Over a cen-tury and a half of scientific investigation of these interesting prehistoric peoplesand different aspects of their legacy resulted in a vast accumulation of data on theirbiology, technology, economy and lifestyle, and various other aspects of their dai-ly lives and deaths. Indeed, the term Neandertal (or Neanderthal) is almost a dailyoccurrence in popular press (and not always related to scientific issues). Alongsidedinosaurs, Neandertals are probably the most famous prehistoric beings – every-one’s favorite “cave man”, the ever-present brute from the past. It is not the goalof this publication to deal with the Neandertal image (although this is one of theimportant topics our iNEAL COST Action working group 4 has been involved in).Neither is specific attention given to the debate and views of their taxonomy (i.e.whether they are a separate, sister species, Homo neanderthalensis, or wheth-er we should see them as a subspecies of our own species and refer to them asHomo sapiens neanderthalensis). These, although very important, issues of phy-logeny and taxonomy of Pleistocene hominins, is not discussed in this publica-tion. What we tried to achieve is the gathering of the most important informationrelevant for the study of Neandertals.