Coming into the ring at 5 feet 5 inches tall stands the male Neanderthal and on the opposite side of the ring coming in at 5 feet 8 inches tall stands the average American man. 

Fight! 

Slate’s Brian Palmer stacks up our fighters to see who would win this epic battle. 

The average neanderthal gets a good workout.  They hunt mammoths, and drag 50 pounds of their meat back home 30 miles.  They have a wider pelvis and a lower center of gravity, that makes them harder to knock down and better at grappling.  Their brains are also more animal like which may allow them to struggle and fight longer than an average human would. 

Now lets look at the average American.  Being taller would give a human a bigger reach to land our punches, and being smarter allows us to maximize our advantages. 

There's where our advantages stop. 

While the average neanderthal gets a good work, many Americans do not.  Our diets are crappy and we have an obesity problem.  Our smarts may also work against us.  Humans tend to collapse under the psychological stress of being wounded where as animals do not. 

Really the only human with an advantage would be an MMA fighter.  Then we might have the advantage. 

In the end it doesn't matter because we won the evolution battle, and neanderthals are nothing compared to other human like species like Homo heidelbergensis that was more than seven feet tall with thick bones.  Let's just be lucky we are not in any competition with them.