Even then, the duo noted that their conclusions were based on small and possibly unrepresentative samples. And after 17 years, Trinkaus doubled back on his idea completely, noting that later studies had found similar injury patterns among the Pleistocene humans who lived alongside Neanderthals. The rodeo rider hypothesis, he said, should be “further qualified if not simply retracted.” (Trinkaus declined to be interviewed for this story.)

But the hypothesis, and the broader notion of highly traumatized Neanderthals, clung to the popular consciousness as tenaciously as an imagined Neanderthal to a mammoth’s back. Some researchers have argued that their frequently broken bodies would have stopped Neanderthals from effectively passing technological skills to each other. Others have argued that they could only have survived their common wounds through medical savvy.

But in a new study—the largest of its kind—Katerina Harvati and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen have shown that head injuries really weren’t that common in Neanderthals, and certainly no more so than in contemporaneous Homo sapiens. “This implies that Neanderthal trauma does not require its own special explanations, and that risk and danger were as much a part of the life of Neanderthals as they were of our own evolutionary past,” writes Marta Mirazon Lahr from the University of Cambridge, in an accompanying editorial.

“The [high frequency of] head trauma has been used to argue that they were more violent with each other, or hunted in a more particular way,” says Harvati. “We’ve taken away one piece of evidence for that. It’s important to re-examine our assumptions about their behaviors.”

Other studies had come to similar conclusions, but none have looked at such a large number of skeletons, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archeologist from the University of Bordeaux who studies Neanderthals. “It really [helps] to push back against the stubborn image of Neanderthals as having massively battered bodies,” she says. That image persisted partly because “it seemed to be a believable reason why we were supposedly more successful. Having clear data to disprove that, based on a really good sample size, [adds to] the growing view that there were many similarities in behavior between the two species.”

This study adds to the continuing image makeover of Neanderthals, which had long been pictured as brutish and unsophisticated. It’s now clear that they made tools, used fire, made art, buried their dead, and perhaps even had language.

By combing through previous studies, Harvati’s colleague Judith Beier compared the skulls of 114 Neanderthals and 90 modern humans, all of whom lived in Europe and Asia between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago. (The term “modern human” here refers to Homo sapiens, rather than present-day people.) She estimated that between 4 and 33 percent of Neanderthals would have had some kind of head injury, compared with 2 to 34 percent of contemporaneous modern humans.