Big, brutish and stupid - it's a commonly held view that our prehistoric predecessors were as wild and unsophisticated as the animals they hunted.

But Neanderthal Man was not as slow-witted as he looked and was in reality as smart as we are, an archaeologist claims.

They were actually innovators who used different forms of tools to adapt to the ecological challenges posed by harsh habitats as they spread through regions of Europe.

Although our sister species has become the butt of jokes about people who behave and act moronically they were years ahead of their time as they constantly had to change with their environment.

Dr Terry Hopkinson, of Leicester University, said palaeoanthropologists are wrong to be dismissive of the archaeological finds beyond 40,000 years ago when modern humans replaced their cavemen cousins.

Neanderthals were far from behaviourally static and incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique.

He said: "There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa."

But the modern traits accompanying the change such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades and big game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago.

Dr Hopkinson told New Scientist: "It was the same in Europe with Neanderthals, there was a gradual accumulation of technology."

Archaeological finds from across Europe show the Neanderthals fused two forms of toolmaking called the faconnage and the debitage techniques.

In the former a stone core is shaped by chipping off flakes of flint - the latter involves producing sharp-edged flakes from a core.

More than 300,000 years ago the two techniques were practised separately but Dr Hopkinson argues Neanderthals then fused them into a single method known as the Levallois reduction technique.

At the same time as this was occurring excavations show Neanderthals spread into central and eastern Europe, regions where they and their forebears, Homo heidelbergensis, had hitherto been unable to settle.

In western Europe the influence of the Atlantic improves the extreme seasonality of the continent but away from this the environment was too harsh for them to cope.

Dr Hopkinson said: "The eastern expansion shows the Neanderthals became capable of managing their lives and their landscapes in strongly seasonal environments."

This period is commonly thought to be characterised by long periods of little change in technological and perhaps
also cognitive development, says Dr Katerina Harvati of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

She said: "This analysis highlights important aspects of Neanderthal cultural and cognitive evolution which are not
always emphasised."

Neanderthals have typically been thought of as incapable of innovation as it was assumed to be something unique to Homo sapiens, says Dr Hopkinson.

He added: "With this evidence of innovation it becomes difficult to exclude Neanderthals from the concept of humanity."