[dijit]

Fair point, and those papers are interesting (particularly the first one, which directly talks about this..).

I think we might be talking about two different things though. The scientific evidence for Neanderthal sophistication was there from the late 1950s; Straus and Cave reexamined the La Chapelle skeleton I spoke about earlier and basically said "this fella could ride the subway in new york and nobody would look twice", the Shanidar burials showed care for the sick, and there were decades of tool and burial evidence piling up after that. So the science was there, it just wasn't penetrating into popular culture.

And I think that's where your sources make a good point, the DNA discovery in 2010 probably did act as the catalyst for the popular rehabilitation. It gave journalists and TV producers a reason to care about something archaeologists had been saying for decades. Whether that reason worked because of racial identification specifically or because "you have caveman DNA" is just a more compelling headline is probably where we'd disagree; I suspect it's both, honestly.

Where I'd still push back a little is on the framing that this was purely a "white people found out they're related, so rebrand" phenomenon. The racial hierarchy framework that created the original caricature was already academically dead well before 2010, the correction was happening regardless, it maybe just wasn't getting airtime.