Neanderthal
Americanadjective
-
of or relating to Neanderthal man.
-
(often lowercase) primitive, unenlightened, or reactionary; culturally or intellectually backward.
noun
-
(often lowercase)
-
an unenlightened or ignorant person; barbarian.
-
a reactionary; a person with very old-fashioned ideas.
-
adjective
-
relating to or characteristic of Neanderthal man
-
primitive; uncivilized
-
informal ultraconservative; reactionary
noun
-
An extinct variety of human that lived throughout Europe and in parts of western Asia and northern Africa during the late Pleistocene Epoch, until about 30,000 years ago. Neanderthals had a stocky build and large skulls with thick eyebrow ridges and big teeth. They usually lived in caves, made flaked stone tools, and were the earliest humans known to bury their dead. Neanderthals were either a subspecies of modern humans (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or a separate, closely related species (Homo neanderthalensis). They coexisted with early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) for several thousand years before becoming extinct, but are not generally believed to have interbred with them.
-
See also Mousterian
Discover More
The term Neanderthal is sometimes used to refer to a person who is thought to have primitive or unenlightened ideas: “I tried talking politics to Joe, but he's a real Neanderthal.”
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of Neanderthal
First recorded in 1860–65; after Neanderthal, valley in Germany, near Düsseldorf, where evidence of Neanderthal man was first found
Explanation
A neanderthal is someone who is rude and not very smart. If your brother interrupts your garden party by spraying your guests with a hose, you can call him a neanderthal. When neanderthal is spelled with a lower-case n, it means a cretin or a dolt — a rough, mean, and slightly foolish person. If you spell it with a capital N, it means an extinct species of human being, and it's the root of the lower-case version. The word Neanderthal is German, named for the Neander Valley where human fossils have been found, and around 1926 neanderthal became popular British slang for a "big, brutish, stupid person."
Vocabulary lists containing neanderthal
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The genetic flow documented at the time they last came into contact therefore operates in only one direction, from Neanderthal to Sapiens.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
El País announces that Neanderthal men “chose” Sapiens women.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
It proposes something much narrower: within the space of models it tests, certain scenarios make an asymmetry of the Neanderthal male/Sapiens female type more plausible.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
By contrast, the Neanderthal genomes available so far document no recent Sapiens contribution within the last Neanderthal populations.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
And even if a Neanderthal Romeo and a Sapiens Juliet fell in love, they could not produce fertile children, because the genetic gulf separating the two populations was already unbridgeable.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Nor can encounters between Neanderthals and Sapiens be reduced to past loves or wars merely transposed from our modern imagination.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
If Sapiens women had, in fact, regularly entered Neanderthal groups, we would expect to see a recent genetic signal of Sapiens ancestry persisting among the last Neanderthals.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 7, 2026
That connection exists despite the likelihood that Neanderthals differed substantially from modern humans in many aspects of cognition.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 12, 2026
Species including Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals likely had increasingly strong right-hand preferences, eventually leading to the extreme dominance seen in modern humans.
From Science Daily ● May 18, 2026
By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
