Glimpse life as a Neanderthal!

Enduringly portrayed as muscle-bound, brainless and unfeeling, Neanderthals may at last start to turn the tide of opinion if a new venture has its way.

Enduringly portrayed as muscle-bound, brainless and unfeeling, Neanderthals may at last start to turn the tide of opinion if a new venture has its way.

HT Image

Combining tourism and archaeology, the "palaeosite" at the village of Saint-Cesaire, 140 kilometres (85 miles) north of Bordeaux, in southwestern France, aims to give visitors a breathtaking snapshot of how these hominids lived 35,000 years ago.

"It's not a museum, nor an amusement park; it's a new concept which has no equivalent anywhere in the world," said Didier Brennenmann, an engineer who spent five years overseeing the construction of the 13-million-euro (16-million-dollar) complex.

Financed mostly by local authorities, the centre has been built at the site of a dig where in 1979 archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a 20-year-old Neanderthal woman they dubbed "Pierrette."

Her remains shook up contemporary knowledge of Neanderthals, teasing out the notion that this enigmatic hominid species may have been smarter and socially more organised than anyone thought.

Conceived as a veritable time-machine, the centre will allow visitors to follow the life of Pierrette and her clan, said Allan Smith, a New Zealander who organised the special effects.

"We'll be showing a scientific account of the life of Pierrette and her clan which at the same time is a personal account," he said.

Groups of 60 people, forming a "tribe", will begin a tour of the 2,000-square-meter (22,000-square-foot) centre every 15 minutes, paying an entry fee of nine euros (11.25 dollars) for adults and 5.50 euros (6.87 dollars) for children.

First stop is the "waiting room", where the "tribe" will see the birth of the universe, from the original Big Bang to the emergence of mammals.

A little farther along, in an amphitheatre equipped with giant screens, real objects and special effects, they will witness the appearance of mankind, from the earliest hominids through to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, as anatomically modern man is known.

Here, computers will have robots turn the pages of books, or move objects around.

Explanations will come from documentaries featuring scientists such as Yves Coppens, "godfather" of the palaeosite and a professor at the College of France in Paris, where scientists have worked and taught since 1530.

Interactivity is taken to an extreme by the "palaeopass" which will be given to each visitor, and which will record such details as the visitor's sex, age, weight and height.

The visitor can use the pass in a photobooth to see his or her face transformed into a "Neanderthal".

Beside that booth is an iron arm for testing one's strength against a Neanderthal with a similar physique ... and who does not always win.

"The Neanderthals must have been very strong, but some modern people can match them," said Bernard Vandermeersch, a professor who with Coppens co-chairs the scientific committee overseeing the centre.

Vandermeersch, an expert on Neanderthals, said he hoped the centre would help dispel the myths about Neanderthals as "archaic, crude, hairy, and slouching".

"If we can do certain things today, it's because they did them before us, so there's no question of relegating them to some obscure backyard," he said.

"It's a question of being different from us, but not necessarily inferior."

Smaller than Homo sapiens but with larger brains, Neanderthals lived in Europe, parts of Central Asia and the Middle East for some 170,000 years until they inexplicably disappeared around 28,000-30,000 years ago.

They left behind some big questions.

Were they massacred or outsmarted by Homo sapiens, a rising species and rival for territory and food? In short, were they just a genetic failure, a branch but not part of the trunk of the human family tree?

Or -- as some have controversially suggested -- did they interbreed with the new hominid on the block and eventually fade away as a separate species?

If this theory is true, they presumably left a legacy of Neanderthal genes that survive in us today... and thus may be our cousins.