we can't really trace indo european back further than southern russia of about or years ago while current best evidence is that the last neanderthals lived around gibraltar or portugal about years ago so it would appear to be quite a stretch people can sometimes retain purely oral folk memories of things that happened thousands of years ago but such memories tend to be heavily genericized and assimilated to common motifs or archetypes considering that germanic folk memory transformed attila the hun from an oppressive and sinister foreign conqueror to a noble king atli etzel in less than a thousand years i doubt that there's much possibility for accurate or specific folk memories of neanderthals over more than years