BOOK REVIEW : Living in Harsh Harmony With Nature : THE NEANDERTALS: Changing the Image of Mankind, by Eric Trinkhaus and Pat Shipman ; Alfred A. Knopf; $30; 488 pages

The butt of countless caveman jokes and cartoons, the stout, resilient Neanderthal men and women may have come closer than any other humans to living in harmony with nature. They picked a tough environment, though--the Ice Age.

For at least 50,000 years, generation after generation of the short (5-foot, 3-inch), massively muscled men and women endured the freezing temperatures of Europe and the Middle East, gathering roots and berries and hunting prehistoric goats, small deer and other animals with stones, clubs and sharpened sticks.

Life was almost unimaginably tough. Few Neanderthals lived into their 40s, and most suffered serious injuries and illnesses. Nearly all adults had advanced periodontal disease.

One especially beat-up male had recovered from a crushing blow to the head and the loss of an eye, as well as from another blow to the side of his body that broke several ribs and cost him his right arm. Still another injury had smashed one of his feet, which never healed properly. Yet he survived to the ripe old age of 50 and was buried ceremoniously in a grave bedecked with flowers.

Practitioners of family values, Neanderthals not only cared for their frail senior citizens, but when they found a spot that suited them, they stayed for a while.

A cave in Yugoslavia shows evidence of 30,000 years of continuous Neanderthal habitation, punctuated by episodes of cannibalism--an ironic backdrop for today’s troubles in that region.

In any event, when the glaciers finally began to melt away, about 35,000 years ago, the Neanderthals mysteriously vanished. They were replaced by the Cro-Magnon men and women--the fully modern humans known for the hauntingly beautiful paintings of wild animals they left in caves in southern France. What happened to the Neanderthals? The question has haunted scientists almost since the first Neanderthal remains were discovered in Germany in 1856.

Eric Trinkhaus, a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and co-author (with science writer and professor of medicine Pat Shipman) of the present overstuffed history of research on Neanderthals, proposes that some interbreeding must have occurred but that the Cro-Magnons reproduced faster, genetically swamping the Neanderthals.

Modern women will shudder at Trinkhaus’ hypothesized reason for the difference in reproductive rates. Neanderthal women, Trinkhaus says, had wider pelvises than the physically modern Cro-Magnon women and could therefore, in theory, bear larger children. Trinkhaus proposes that Neanderthal women carried their offspring for a full 12 months.

“The idea invokes to some a comic image of a monstrously pregnant Neanderthal woman, lumbering along, looking and feeling like she had swallowed a bison,” Trinkhaus and Shipman say.

Fortunately, perhaps, the authors devote relatively little of “The Neandertals” to their own theories about human origins. Instead, they trace scientific debates over Neanderthal remains from the first discovery to the present day.

The debates were about much more than whether humans had evolved from the lower mammals. When the Neanderthal bones were finally accepted as authentic, around the turn of the century, a few influential thinkers asserted that the existence of the Neanderthals represented a scientific basis for racism.

They proclaimed that Aryan Germans were descended from a master race and that the rest of Europeans were of genetically inferior stock. Thus was born the science of eugenics--selective breeding of humans. Not long afterward, Hitler came to power.

But the main characters in “The Neandertals” are scientists. The book’s action consists mostly of voices raised in scholarly dispute in laboratories and scientific meetings. The book’s hero seems to be the “tall, lanky, fair-haired” Trinkhaus, who arrives on the academic scene with his “calm assessment” just in time to save the Neanderthal from being permanently misunderstood.