Neanderthals probably suffered from psoriasis. They were susceptible to Crohn’s disease. They appear to have been capable of producing abstract designs. They made tools out of bone and, quite possibly, decorations out of feathers. These are some of the latest findings on our beetle-browed relatives—the studies seem to be arriving every few weeks now—and they’ve had the unsettling effect of making them seem ever more like us.

It is no longer news that Neanderthals and modern humans were similar enough to interbreed. That discovery made headlines worldwide when it was first announced, in the spring of 2010, by a team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. “Humans and Neanderthals: Getting It On, After All,” a typical one read. (I wrote about the lead scientist responsible for this discovery, Svante Pääbo, in 2011.)

This “getting it on” left a lasting mark: even today, all non-Africans retain bits of Neanderthal DNA.

Research published last year indicates that human-Neanderthal couplings were rare, and that the offspring they produced had fertility problems. This, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were not so closely related to modern humans as to count as members of the same species. (Other recent research suggests that susceptibility to psoriasis and Crohn’s disease can be traced back to the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals, and are traits shared by both species.)

The finding that the products of human-Neanderthal romance (or, just as likely, rape) had fertility problems is not surprising: many hybrid creatures have trouble reproducing. At the same time, it makes the question of why so many of us still possess traces of the Neanderthal genome that much more intriguing. For the genetic results to make sense, modern humans must have interbred with Neanderthals after they migrated out of Africa but before they spread into Europe and Asia. Were certain bits of Neanderthal DNA in some way useful to people as they migrated into new climates and new terrains?

A study published just last month in the journal Nature proposes that the encounters took place in Israel. A fifty-five-thousand-year-old skull found in a cave near the Sea of Galilee was identified as that of a modern human. (Probably it belonged to a woman.) It’s the first evidence that’s been found that humans were living in the region at the same time Neanderthals are known to have inhabited it.

The spot “is the best candidate for the interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals,” one of the authors of the Nature study, Israel Hershkovitz, of Tel Aviv University, told the Guardian. “There is really no other candidate,” he added.

Also last month, researchers at the University of Montreal announced that they’d found a fifty-five-thousand-year-old tool made of bone in a cave in France. Because, at that point, modern humans had not yet reached France, the tool, fashioned from a reindeer femur, must have been made by Neanderthals. The question of whether Neanderthals made bone tools—really, whether they were smart enough to figure out that bones could be turned into useful tools—has been long debated in anthropological circles; the new finding, assuming that it holds up, should put an end to that discussion. The technological divide between modern humans and Neanderthals, which now looks to us so enormous, may have seemed a great deal smaller fifty millennia ago, perhaps to the point of non-existence.

“This discovery reduces the presumed gap between the two species and prevents us from saying that one was technically superior to the other" is how one of the University of Montreal researchers, Luc Droyon, put it.

The bone-tool announcement came just six months after a team of European researchers announced that it had found an engraved design made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar. The design, which resembles a tic-tac-toe board and was scratched into the wall of cave, is not much to look at; still, it suggests that Neanderthals created what might, very broadly speaking, be called art. An interest in art has long been held to be exclusive to modern humans; if Neanderthals shared this interest, it’s just another way in which human exceptionalism turns out not to be very exceptional. Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum, told the BBC that the scratched design "brings the Neanderthals closer to us, yet again."

It had been comforting to think that the Neanderthals were inferior to modern humans—less clever or dexterous or communicative—and that that’s why they’re no longer around. It turns out, though, that the depiction of Neanderthals as hairy, club-wielding brutes—popular ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered, in the eighteen-fifties—says more about us than it does about them. With each new discovery, the distance between them and us seems to narrow. Probably they are no longer here precisely because we are. And that only makes the likeness more disquieting.