Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were pretty great though. I mean, racism and people using anthropology to try and act superior to each other aside (which, I will grant, is a pretty big fucking aside): neanderthals were crazy strong and had bodies which had much more "explosive" muscle fibres than that of modern humans (or H. Sapiens of the era). They, of course, had significant misgivings which likely led to their extinction- but I wonder how…
After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies. Neanderthals didn't get a rebrand because white people found out they shared DNA; the bad reputation was always built on dodgy science that was already being dismantled. The whole "brutish caveman" thing traces back to 1908, when a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule got his hands on a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleto…
You are approaching this from the scientific angle. The reality is even worst that the video implies.
As soon as Neanderthals became genetic relatives of many living non-Africans ,-) Western portrayals became more willing to imagine them as human like, and even ...white.
"How Neanderthals Became White: The Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics" - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/720130
"‘Race’ and the Changing Representations of Neanderthals" - https://scholar.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/publications/race-and-the-ch...
"Making the Neanderthals White: Historicizing Ancestry, Race, and Hominin Heritage" - https://philpapers.org/rec/KERMTN