Some 75,000 years ago, a man sat in the Shanidar caveAn archaeological site on Bradost Mountain in Iraq. Scientists investigating Neanderthal bones there were followed by a camera crew on a BBC and Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals. in what is now northern IraqA country in the Middle East with a population of 43.5m. . He was blind in one eye, unable to use his right arm, and missing a hand. His teeth were worn down to nothing and he was almost deaf.¹

With these injuries he could not have looked after himself. That means others must have brought him food and helped him eat, keeping him alive for as long as possible.

If this gives you faith in humanity's essential goodness, think again: the man was not a homo sapiensThe species to which all modern humans belong. Homo sapiens means "wise man" in Latin. . He was a NeanderthalAn extinct species of human that lived until 40,000 years ago. . And he is helping to reshape our understanding of our long-dead cousins.

When Neanderthals were first reconstructed in 1911, scientists portrayed Neanderthals as brutish and violent, with sloping foreheads and little intelligence.²

But more recent discoveries have found they were creative, painting their cave walls just like we did. They treated each other with compassion. They may even have buried their dead.

So when the scientists working at the Shanidar site tried to reconstruct the face of a Neanderthal woman, they portrayed her with a kindly, gentle face.³

But as other scientists point out, this is all speculation. All we have of Neanderthals is their skeletons. We know nothing of how they really looked.

So reconstructing the Neanderthals like this is really a question of how we want to see them.

But then some think this is what we do all the time anyway. We interpret and manipulate people's faces to fit our view of them.

The problem is that we can never be sure we are reading other people's faces correctly.

Sigmund FreudAn Austrian psychoanalyst who was one of the world's foremost authorities on psychology in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Although his ideas have been discredited in the scientific community, he remains influential for literary scholars. thought this was why Christ's command to "love thy neighbour" was so revolutionary. Because we cannot ever really know what other people are thinking, making the choice to love them is a terrifying and uncertain act.

So we try to make their faces more familiar to us. When Christianity spread in China and Africa, local people often portrayed the figure of Jesus as east Asian or Black himself.

Sometimes this habit of reading people's faces the way we want to can cause cross-cultural confusion.

In BuddhismA religion of eastern and central Asia. It began with the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama on suffering. , benevolentWell-meaning and kind., enlightened beings are often portrayed with weapons and snarling faces.

This is the form they take on when they are fighting demons.⁵ But outside visitors often take them for demons themselves.

Do faces always lie?

Yes: There is no way of knowing what is behind another person's eyes. We tell ourselves comforting fictions to conceal the reality that the human world is a terrifying, unpredictable place.

No: The essence of human beings is to communicate with each other. We love each other's company. That is why we developed common facial cues that allow others to read our body language.

Or... We can never be entirely sure of what others are thinking, but we do not really need to be. What matters is that we live in a society where most people do not wish each other any specific ill.