Things look different now that we know the blood feeding neurons crackling like fireworks in 6 billion living brains – yours, as you read this page – carry the legacy of the Neanderthals. That the vast majority of living people are their descendants is, by any measure, some sort of evolutionary success.[p. 377]
This is a splendid book, pulling together a vast amount of research from diverse disciplines and arranging it thematically. Each chapter is prefaced by a short, poetic passage depicting an imagined Neanderthal: Wragg Sykes leavens what can often be a dry catalogue of finds and theories with digressions, anecdotes, vivid metaphors and witty asides. (I groaned, cheerfully, at her remark about the DNA analysis of dental calculus: "as a technique it’s still teething".) She's very good at contextualising and comparing. Discussing the population density of Neanderthals, who thrived as a species for half a million years and whose remains are found from Wales to China, Siberia to Gibraltar, she writes: "Total population estimates tend to be in tens of thousands or even less. At any point in time there may have been fewer Neanderthals walking about than commuters passing each day through Clapham Junction..." [p213].
Wragg Sykes focusses on the Neanderthals themselves, rather than their contribution to the human gene pool or their similarities to and differences from ourselves. Throughout Kindred, though, she asks the big questions that help to explore their humanity: did they have possessions? did they make art? did their lives have a spiritual aspect? did they really eat their dead? (The answer to the last, intriguingly, is 'not as often as H. Sapiens'.) And yes, they did interbreed with H. Sapiens, at various points during the period of overlap -- and the Neanderthals, at least, took good care of the hybrid children.
I was charmed to read, in the afterword, this acknowledgement: "I want to proudly acknowledge the debt I owe to Jean Auel. The great trouble she took to try and represent tiny details of Palaeolithic life fired up my nascent childhood interest in prehistory, and in many ways her depiction of Neanderthals was prescient." [p. 382] My interest in Neanderthals was also sparked by Jean Auel's novels, and I'm continually fascinated by how new discoveries and theories fit into her fictionalised theories.
This was a delightful and intellectually stimulating read, and made me want to catch up on other non-technical books on the Neanderthals -- not to mention news articles about new archaeological / paleontological discoveries. Impressive, readable and humane.
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