What might this tell us (if anything)

[SerendipityJane]

I can't help but feel this explains something .... quite aside from the rather dubiously coy headline conclusion

Jane going on the image and headline we can infer the homo sapiens woman is processing the hide of a killed large prey animal and it might turn out to have a finer finish than the hide slung over the shoulders of the Neanderthal man.

I would need to see the original/source materials to make comment as to why these two individuals appear to be in a dyad.

Nb I am off out to the theatre so I'll have to abandon you til later!

Big thanks to MNHQ for marking the picture as "sensitive". Because I sure as hell didn't.

Is it because we can see his willy?

I've always felt the neanderthals got a raw deal in how we portray them. But you're right, it's interesting to think about. There was less sexual dimorphism in neanderthals, so if one were cynical, they might say that novelty-seeking non-human males were doing what novelty-seeking human males do, which is sniff strange.

But neanderthals lived in small groups that sometimes mingled with us. There's even cave art of their handprints with ours, which makes my heart feel complicated, warm things. It could've been that there weren't enough of their own kind to pair off with sometimes, and since neanderthals had genetic differences that made them more likely to die during childbirth, we simply have more evidence of surviving male neanderthal-female homosapien pairings.

More likely to have paired up, or more likely to have babies that lived?

I like the way the picture is of a settled couple. Clearly predates rape. #sarcasm - but yes of course it could also have been that both groups collaborated rather more than existing sources suggest.