The closely cropped face of the Neanderthal child dos not look too bad, but the full head picture is visibly odd - looks like a caricature, very very few sapiens children have that poor a chin. (But, it does shed a different light on appearance and difference compared to the traditional grunting lowbrow).
Part of the problem is that reconstructions either dress them up in “caveman” drag (long ratty hair, long beard, white skin, dull eyes), or give them modern soft tissue features. Give them hair and facial hair and skin tones and lip configurations that wouldn’t look out of place on a modern H. s. s., and they’ll look a lot like a modern H. s. s. But they probably didn’t in fact have features that would fall within the normal variation of modern humans, they probably had some soft tissue features that were way out there that absolutely no modern human has. And the thing is, cavemen probably never had that ratty “homeless guy” hair that they always stick on them in reconstructions. They groomed themselves, this is something that all primates do.
I think the point of the “suit and shave on the subway” is that you wouldn’t think “Ohmigod, a Neandertal just walked by!”, you’d think “What’s up with that guy?” There are plenty of people that I pass on the street that I don’t give a second look to, but only because it would be extremely rude to stare at them. So your caveman can walk down the street and people keep their eyes front and think “Geez, what happened with him?” The Neandertal would be striking in the same way Valuev would be. You’d notice him, and then you’d keep walking.
Speaking of hair, the modern human hair pattern is very unusual and very distinctive: a mane that can be a meter or more long that sprouts right out of the top of the head along with an almost hairless body - except for the male facial-mane. It would be interesting to know when this craziness evolved but I would suspect that Neanderthals did not have it. But now that we have a Neanderthal genome, that question could potentially be answered.
Right. It seems likely to me that modern human hair is some sort of species marker that we evolved to distinguish ourselves from closely related hominids nearby. And therefore non Homo sapiens sapiens hair distribution patterns would look really weird to us in ways we don’t expect.
Nose hair. I bet Neanderthals had long, luxuriant nose hair.
To go with their ear hair?
Not necessarily. Since we evolved, then moved into (invaded) Neanderthal territory later, then we would not have had to develop markers to distinguish us from them.
The most obvious signals seem to be the most variable - skin and hair coloration, hair length. However, humans’ mechanical grooming probably plays a greater role in controlling this to the point where it is probably irrelevant, and skin color is also determined by climate or environment over the very long run.
I keep looking for an article I saw in the 90s. Someone noticed the similarity in Neanderthal features and those seen suffering from cretinism due to iodine deficiency. I never found a follow up to it, the guy wanted to research this to see if Neanderthal physical characteristics were somehow an adaptation to a low iodine diet.
I don’t have a lick of additional information, but I found it interesting at the time.
Since we’re speculating… given our penchant for elaborate body ornamentation, and our grooming habits (no primitive human groups routinely grow their hair to their knees or encourage gigantic beards on men), why would there be pressure to evolve distinctive body markers? If that happened, then it probably would have happened to our common ancestor with Neanderthals further back in time (or earlier).
But we also shared ranges with other species of Homo for a long time. So the markers might have been to distinguish us from Homo erectus. Admittedly, behavioral differences might have easily been enough, so my whole theory is rank speculation.
The chances of their having been people in Australia that long ago is incredibly remote.
The article you link to certainly does not make any such claim. It does quote (or I suspect misquote) one scientist saying that Aboriginals split from the rest of humanity 64,000 years ago, and thus must have arrived in Australia 64,000 years ago. If you can’t see the obvious flaw in that “reasoning” there’s something wrong.
“Mungo Man” is estimated to be about 40K years old. Has anything older been found since?
Nothing that varies by more than a few thousand years at most. There are some dates for artifacts based on thermoluminescence that go back as far as 250, 000 years, but nobody takes them seriously. ~45, 000 years is the consensus, with 50, 000 generally considered the absolute earliest.
And yet, to extrapolate from an old Time Life book of mine, if both the Neanderthal and the anatomically modern human are wearing Brooks Brothers suits and buying groceries, the average onlooker may not be able to tell who’s who.
I’ve always rather doubted that claim. No chin is a big clue, as John Mace says.
Nn
Our image of Neanderthals in terms of their similarity to us has waxed and waned over the years, but the general trend has been towards “more similar”. When that phrase was coined, the typical picture of a Neanderthal in books was something like this. Count across from top left to the 13th picture. So, there might have been an overreaction in order to correct a common misconception that Neanderthals were slumped over brutes of low intelligence.
But you got the quote a little wrong, and if you go back and read the way Colibri quoted it, it was more that you wouldn’t notice him on a subway, not that you would be unable to tell them apart under close scrutiny.
My own wife once passed in front of me getting on to a subway car a few stops after I had and I didn’t notice her.
Just sayin’.
Yeah, but how big are her brow ridges? 
She’d probably just had them waxed.
Was she wearing Brooks Brothers?