Hi, my name is John Wallam. I'm a writer at large for the New York Times magazine.

And today you're going to hear a story that I wrote a few years ago about Neanderthals.

I'm going to stop right there because it feels a little unnatural to me to say Neanderthal instead of Neanderthal.

But I'm committed to doing it because after several conversations and emails with the editors of the Daily,

we've all made it a pact to pronounce it Neanderthal, mostly because we believe that is the correct pronunciation.

But also because it feels like a way to separate Neanderthals, the extinct human beings,

from Neanderthals, a kind of ignorant slur levied on living humans today as in,

wow, what a Neanderthal that guy is.

That distinction was really on my mind when I started out writing this story.

I've been reading a lot about new research, about Neanderthals,

how they lived, the things they were capable of, their culture for a lack of a better word.

And just starting to realize that this was another kind of human being,

and how weird that is to try to imagine what it would be like to be sitting around a campfire

somewhere and seeing another kind of human being locked by. That's different, but not so different

that you apparently also didn't want to have sex with them sometimes.

So my inability to really make sense of that was kind of exhilarating and it

set me off on this reporting project which wound up taking I think about half a year.

And I think a lot of this story ultimately is about the ways in which we regard other people.

And the degree to which we pick up on the sameness or the differences between us.

And then how quick we are to make judgments about those differences we see.

So I hope this will be a good company for you right now. Here's my story, Neanderthals,

where people too read by Grover Gardner.

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