Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s book paints a vivid portrait of our adaptable ancient relatives.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art Rebecca Wragg SykesBloomsbury Sigma (2020)
A quarter of the way through Kindred, I was longing to meet a Neanderthal. By the end, I realized that we had met. She is in me — or at least, in my genes.
In this deeply researched “twenty-first-century portrait of the Neanderthals” from birth to burial and beyond, palaeolithic archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes smashes stereotypes. She ranges over 350,000 years, from the Neanderthals’ first emergence more than 400,000 years ago to their disappearance about 40,000 years ago, describing how they bequeathed some of their genes to humans even as they vanished. Neanderthals were, she writes, “not dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree, but enormously adaptable and even successful ancient relatives”.
Based on fossil finds and artefacts from thousands of archaeological sites ranging from north Wales to the borders of China and the fringes of Arabia’s deserts, hers are vivid, immersive depictions of Neanderthals from diverse periods and places. One imagines hunting with them, chewing on horse eyeballs, hammering stones into blades. And one pictures Neanderthals encountering our Homo sapiens ancestors, with whom they crossed paths and mated multiple times over a period of more than 100,000 years, as DNA evidence shows.
Distinct species
To conjure up this world, Wragg Sykes describes myriad discoveries, the first more than a century and a half ago. In the summer of 1856, limestone-quarry workers blasted open the Kleine Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf in what’s now Germany, revealing ancient bones and the top of a skull. Scholars, including anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen in Bonn, Germany, and geologist William King at Queen’s College Galway in Ireland, speculated. Did the thick bones belong to a “barbarous and savage race” of humans (as proposed by Schaaffhausen)? Or had they come from an extremely ancient “pre-human”? It was King who named the species Homo neanderthalensis.
As further fossils were found — including the skeletons of two adults in Belgium in 1866 and a baby at the rock shelter of Le Moustier in France in 1914 — scholars agreed that Neanderthals were an extinct species distinct from humans. We now have specimens from between 200 and 300 Neanderthal individuals, ranging from newborns to adults in their fifties or even sixties, many just a single bone or jaw fragment.[…]
Continue reading: Horse eyeballs and bone hammers: surprising lives of the Neanderthals
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