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I was a young man in the stone age (1970s), you insensitive clod! I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did get all the bugs out.

The "stone age" was a wonderous time to be a young nerd. As there was cheap and easy contraception, no incurable STDs (the CIA had yet to invent AIDS), and women were trying to get parity with men, even a nerd could get laid! In fact, in the stone age women would ask ME (of all people) "wanna fuck, dude?" as easily as they would ask "Hey, you got a joint?" or "man, my radio's broke, can you look at it for me?"

File sharing (via cassettes) was legal. We had wooden computers called "slide rules" because electronic ones were still insanely expensive.

You young fellows don't know what you're missing. Man, I really miss the stone age.

"The Homo sapiens bought out the Neanderthals tools and buried them, thus ensuring the success of Homo sapien tools."

No, our ancestors went to the overburdened Neanderthal Patent Office, "proved" prior art, and sued the Neanderthals into extinction.

... there is no scientific consensus that the average homo sapiens is smart, either.

I think this is all just part of Geico's back-pedal campaign.

They realize they screwed up and pissed off a bunch of Neanderthals.

The intelligence of Neanderthals is not necessarily the driving force of their ability to compete with homosapien. They could have been equally as smart or even smarter on an individual basis. However their collective intelligence, the ability to operate in larger groups, rather than extended family groups, means the while individually they might have been smarter and stronger they ended up being outnumber on the field of conflict.

Also homosapiens were likely to have been more vengeful and fielded a larger group to pursue and Neanderthals after a hunting party skirmishes, which initially the Neanderthals might have won and collected their prize of long pig only to be latter pursued by a far larger group combative homospaiens.

So the difference is not in the individual intelligence but in the social collective intelligence, the group that worked together, that shared an extended tribal awareness and, that were willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and effort in support of the future goals of the group proved to be far more successfully as a group. Pretty much the same as it is today. The societies where the individuals are only out to gain as much as they can for themselves regardless of the harm to the group create more unsuccessful society than those a care, share and are willing to work for the collective good. The ratio between the greedy few and the more aware majority define the nature modern societies more so than the individual intelligence of it's members.

Netcraft confirms it: the Neanderthal is dead!

Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.

Furthermore, it's been a very long time since there was any scientific consensus about the "stupid Neanderthal" anyway. As another poster said, popular culture != science. The American Museum of Natural History has a now decades-old depiction of a Neanderthal in a suit & tie as part of an exhibit debunking the old popular-science depiction of Neanderthals as unsavoury brutes.

I recently read one of the more interesting ideas about how Neanderthals' brains differs from ours; this idea is due to Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind as described in Britain BC by Francis Pryor. Basically, his idea from interpreting Neanderthal art and tools is that they were no less intelligent but more "domain specific" than we are; they could excel at specialized tasks but fail to seize upon those very important cross-disciplinary insights involving multiple disparate fields of endeavour, which provide the basis for all our inventions.

In Britain BC, Pryor paints a picture of Neanderthals as a bunch of obsessive and overspecialized collectors. In reading about these somewhat Aspergian-sounding traits, I remember thinking that these guys would probably have made great coders! (Though maybe not project managers.)

Actually my understanding is that it is a less strict dietary requirements that allowed humans to survive while the neanderthals died off during an ice age. The idea is that humans would eat anything (omnivores) - greens, roots, fish, insects, meat, eggs, whatever and that the neanderthals were quite strict carnivores. When the source of food becomes scarce, those who are more diverse eaters will have an advantage.