Mettmann, Germany: Learn about our distant relations at Neanderthal Museum

There's something uncanny about the man in a suit as he leans on a concrete wall. No matter how much I try to focus on the museum's exhibits, my eye is drawn back to him. It's as if my brain can't believe that he's real.

And that's fair enough, for the figure in a business suit is a dummy and not quite human – or at least, not human as we think of it today. He's a Neanderthal, a member of the species Homo neanderthalensis, which disappeared from the Earth about 40,000 years ago. For millennia they shared Europe with the later-arriving species Homo sapiens: that's us, modern humans.

Why is the Neanderthal Museum located here, in the countryside east of the German city of Dusseldorf? The answer is in the museum's name.

In 1856, just three years before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, a group of workmen happened upon a mysterious fossilised skeleton in a cave in the Neandertal, or Neander Valley in English. In German "tal" means valley, so the place granted its name (with an additional old-fashioned "h" in its spelling) to this previously unknown type of human.

The museum stands near the site where the fossils were discovered. From the outside it's a sleek oval-shaped lozenge of glass and steel, designed to hint at the DNA double-helix as visitors walk along its internal sloping ramps.

Entering, I find figures representing humans and their predecessors, over a time span of three million years. At one end is us and our Neanderthal cousins, at the other is Lucy, the pre-human Australopithecus afarensis whose remains were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. There's a charming audio recording presented as if from Lucy herself, explaining where her bones travelled after their famous discovery.

The next section, Life and Survival, explains how, prompted by climatic changes, our pre-human ancestors came down from the trees and adapted to walking across open country. Two million years ago, the early humans known as Homo erectus left Africa for the first time, and Neanderthals evolved from them.

Displays point out the similarities and differences between Neanderthals and ourselves, the former having bigger brains, more powerful bodies, and heavier brows. Contrary to popular belief and dated television programs, Neanderthals were likely just as intelligent as we are, and could speak as easily.