They’re often portrayed as primitive cavemen with limited intelligence. But it turns out that Neanderthals—a species related to early humans that went extinct about 40,000 years ago—may have been smart enough to take prehistoric versions of antibiotics and aspirin. Australian researchers analyzed the teeth of a Neanderthal in Spain from 50,000 years ago. His fossilized dental showed that he’d eaten the fungus that’s the source of penicillin and popped some aspirin (in the form of salicylic acid, found in tree bark). The Neanderthal seemed to have been suffering from tooth decay and digestive ailments, and the researchers think he was trying to relieve his pain. The findings suggest that Neanderthals were more advanced than previously thought and that medicine has a longer history than we’ve realized. “People thought understanding the medicinal properties of plants was . . . recent in origin,” says John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York. “This discovery suggests that that knowledge is ancient.”