Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
(Bloomsbury Sigma, $28)
There’s still so much that our species can learn from our extinct cousins, said Adrian Woolfson in The Wall Street Journal. When quarry workers unearthed hominid bone fragments in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856, the unexpected discovery “challenged the creationist paradigm of a world intentionally created for a single incarnation of mankind.” Since then, Neanderthal remains have been discovered from China to Wales, and artifacts at these sites have overturned the idea that Neanderthals were cretins who inevitably went extinct. In her new book, archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes makes “a bold and magnificent attempt to resurrect our Neanderthal kin,” piecing together the story in a way that at times achieves “the suspense of a Hollywood thriller.” Our fellow hominids become so real it’s as if the author has opened “a window into a strand of alternative human possibility.”
At times the book gets bogged down in technical details, said Barbara King in NPR .org. “Make no mistake, though. What Wragg Sykes has produced in Kindred, after eight years of labor, is masterful.” She shares how a technological revolution in paleoarchaeology over the past 30 years has led to startling findings about the Neanderthal world. And Kindred “comes most to life” when describing behavioral patterns. The Neanderthals’ tools, we’re told, suggest an impressive capacity to anticipate needs and to plan and design for them. Neander
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