Hold one picture in your head: the figure in the museum case. A человек-like person, heavy-browed, short and broad, standing next to a modern human — an early kind of human who really lived, and who died out. That figure is the whole word. Point at it in a science room and you get the plain meaning: a Neanderthal, Neanderthal bones, Neanderthal DNA. Point at someone across a room and you are no longer talking about biology; you are lending them the figure. If you mean their body and manners, you are saying they act like that heavy, rough, silent shape. If you mean their opinions, you are saying their thinking still lives back there, in a world that ended long ago. Nothing about the figure changes. Only who you aim it at.
From the word’s history
From obsolete German Neanderthal (now Neandertal), the name of a valley near Düsseldorf where the first specimen was found in 1856; the valley had been renamed in 1850 after the theologian and hymn writer Joachim Neander (1650–1680). So the word is, literally, "the one from Neander's valley".
來自德文舊拼法 Neanderthal（今作 Neandertal），是杜塞道夫附近一座山谷的名字（德文 Tal「谷」舊寫作 Thal）。1856 年第一具化石就在那裡出土。這座山谷在 1850 年改名，紀念德國神學家與讚美詩作者 Joachim Neander（1650–1680）。所以這個字字面上就是「Neander 谷來的那一位」。也因為是地名來的，科學用法通常保留大寫。
Wiktionary, "neanderthal"
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。