The Neanderthal in Art

Consider some of the images which turn up in studies of the ancient world..... You could easily get the
impression that ancient artists in more than one place in the world had a sort of a penchant for drawing and/or
sculpting a sort of a low-brow type with large to very-large eyes, the two guys on the right in this image in
particular:

Native Australians in fact have a generic name for all such i.e. "wandjina":
From ancient Sumeria, said to pre-date written documents:

Julian Jaynes thought that the eyes in these kinds of statues served some sort of a bicameral purpose and they
may have. Nonetheless I have my own theory (and that's all it is) as to how the idea for such statues may have
originated and it doesn't really involve bicameralism.

The Holden version of this tale involves the gigantic expanse of time which must have elapsed between the
arrival of the first modern humans on Earth and these first civilizations which we have statues or records for. In
those earliest times, you had a sort of an indigenous, generic low-information voter type with huge eyes and a
forehead which sort of went backwards from the eyebrows (Danny Vendramini, www.themandus.org):
The Neanderthal was killed out in a wave going from East to West with the last one apparently dying in
Southern Spain something like 28,000 years ago.

Now, fast forward to about 8000 years ago. Remember Gunnar Heinsohn's statement that in human affairs, a
thousand years is an absolutely gigantic expanse of time; 20,000 years would be an unimaginably gigantic
expanse of time.

My GUESS (remember that's ALL this is) would be that there would no longer have been any sort of photo
albums or anything like that showing accurate depictions of Neanderthals or any of his hominid cousins by that
time. Some artist would walk up to the local shaman, priest, or story-teller and say something like: "Hey, I need
to draw something really different here, you got any sort of ideas along the lines of out-of-the-way artistic
themes??"

And the priest or shaman might reply "You know, they say that a very long time ago, there were magical people
with really huge eyes, and their heads went straight back from their eye-brows....."
The last human group to ever get any sort of a look at Neanderthals would likely have been the Spanish Basque.
The “Basajaun” from Basque folklore and oral tradition is almost certainly a reflection of the Neanderthal:
For the past 60 years or thereabouts, the Neanderthal has been marketed as a sort of a poster-child for kum-bay-
ah religion or whatever you want to call it; these images of Danny Vendramini's come as a sort of a body-blow
to a lot of people who've bought into that. Again, from DV’s site, www.themandus.org: