During my lifetime, Neanderthal man has gotten progressively smarter. Well, not personally smarter because he now survives only in our genomes. But before we knew very much about him — including the fact that he does survive in our genomes — it was easy to co-opt him for the role of the subhuman, which human evolution theory badly needs. Without a subhuman, the human mind has no history. That is a serious blow to any Darwinian materialist project. Now, as a recent piece in The Atlantic by Ross Andersen tells us, excavation of Neanderthal and other sites is leveling even further the fabled Ascent of Man (though Andersen never quite puts it that way): Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces …