Neanderthal
Fully-realized manbacco.
Neanderthal is the strength and flavor profile we had in mind when our focus during the blending of CroMagnon shifted to Nicaragua.
The blend we developed in 2010, while strong, was far too approachable to bear the name. Almost three years later, we discovered a ‘double ligero’ US Pennsylvania Broadleaf filler leaf known as the GRSO (Green River Sucker One), an extremely thick and heavy regrowth leaf. As soon as we smoked it we knew we had discovered the heart of the blend that would become the Neanderthal.
The Neanderthal logo is a depiction of a model housed in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. This model of Neanderthal man was constructed in the 1920s on the basis of excavated bones.
Neanderthal features a high-priming Mexican San Andrés Maduro wrapper and a filler blend consisting of a variety of Nicaraguan Criollo 98 tobaccos from Estelí, Jalapa, Pueblo Nuevo and the Dominican Republic. At its heart, GRSO, a US Pennsylvania Broadleaf Double Ligero. Holding it all together is a US Connecticut Broadleaf binder.
| Vitola | Description |
|---|---|
| HoxD Petite Corona, 4 x 46 | The gene cluster that explains Neanderthal limb morphology. The HoxD silencing trace is measurably present in the modern human genome. |
| SGP Petite Robusto, 4¼ x 52 | Shallow Gene Pool. The genetic bottleneck that ultimately limited the species' adaptive capacity. |
| C3 Petite Gordo, 4½ x 60 | The third cervical vertebra. The Neanderthal C3, longer vertebral body, more horizontal spinous process, is one of the anatomical signatures that distinguish the species from modern humans. |
| KFG Double Robusto, 4¾ x 56 | Kleine Feldhofer Grotte. The cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf where workers blasting limestone in 1856 uncovered the Neanderthal type specimen. |
| HN Figurado, 5 x 54/56 | Homo neanderthalensis. The species itself. Inhabited Europe and western Asia through the Middle and Late Pleistocene; extinct around 40,000 years ago, though populations in Gibraltar may have persisted longer. |
| JCF Robusto, 5¼ x 50 | Johann Carl Fuhlrott. The German teacher and amateur naturalist who, in 1856, recognized that the bones brought to him from the Feldhofer cave belonged to an extinct human form. The first to identify a Neanderthal as a Neanderthal. |
| HS Gran Corona, 5¾ x 46 | Hermann Schaaffhausen. The German anatomist who, with Fuhlrott, presented the Feldhofer skeleton scientifically in 1857, three years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. |
| Vitola | Description |
|---|---|
| LH Double Robusto Prensado, 4¾ x 56P | Lord Humungus. The masked warlord of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981). The pop-culture wink in an otherwise scientific lineup and a fair likeness for the strength of the blend. |
| Gran Perfecto Gran Perfecto, 5 5/8 x 60 | The figurado tapered at both ends, the most demanding shape in any roller's repertoire. The portfolio's recurring LE expression of each blend's outer limits. |
| OM Lancero, 7 x 38 | "The Old Man" of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. The nearly complete ~60,000-year-old male Neanderthal skeleton found in southwestern France in 1908, for decades the source of nearly everything science thought it knew about how Neanderthals stood, walked, and aged. |