Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a paleontologist who has written the best book on Neanderthals I have yet read. It is of course loaded with fascinating information, she also writes with an art that collapses deep time. At some point I was smelling leather and smoke and living in a verdant natural world.

Astonishing book about Neanderthals. Extraordinary what is now known about them and although this sometimes goes into more detail than might be warranted for the general reader, this was absolutely fascinating. A shame the author chose to narrate this herself, but it did at least give a bit of an insight into who she was.

Until a geological eye-blink ago, there existed more than one human species on this planet, and what is more, people indistinguishable from contemporary humans interacted, knew and even bred with them. This fact that is a source of endless fascination to me. This book is as comprehensive a review of the state of knowledge about the most well known of these, the Neanderthals, as can reasonably be delivered in the form of something like a popular science book. Such a great volume of information is presented that it may take some work to get the most out of, particularly for those without a "palaeo" background. But it is worth it. Each chapter begins with a lovely illustration and a scene-setting vignette, who's inspiration is thoroughly show more detailed within the following chapter. These achieve their job admirably, even if their merits as poetic prose/prose-poetry are variable. The bulk of each chapter deals with the evidence for a particular area of inquiry in Neanderthal research, not as a dry academic exercise in exhaustively detailing every piece of information available, but as a survey of the most salient discoveries that over the course of the book, creates an overview of who Neanderthals were, what they did in their varied landscapes and how they related to others, including sapiens. It is an understanding that gives one at once a feeling of privilege, sense of loss tinged wonder and a grounding view of one's own place in the world. show less

What a fabulous book! Dr. Sykes is a researcher in Neanderthal palaeontology, and has done a masterful job of reviewing all the knowledge we've gleaned over the past 160 years of our most closely related species, turning it into a thematically organized survey that's easily readable, full of memorable turns of phrase and details that stick in the reader's mind. I found it a real page-turner, and I was fascinated by the dozens of different research techniques used to tease out knowledge from a fairly scant collection of fossils. Dr. Sykes is outstanding at taking what can be quite dry scientific papers and turning them into understandable and engaging prose, bringing to life Neanderthals who lived and died tens of thousands of years ago. show more I found the chapter on the effects of changing climate, and the chapters on stone tool making techniques to be particularly informative. This is science writing at its finest; Dr. Sykes may prove to be even more gifted as a communicator than as a researcher. show less

Maybe you’ve got to be a bit of an anthropology buff to dig this as much as I did, and honestly who can keep track of which bones and stones were found in exactly which cave, but the underlying argument? Mind boggling! That these people were our equals? Wow; it fills my heart with an ache to know these people in person. It’s a wonder to think we carry them forward inside us. They are we.

Trigger Warnings: Animal death/cruelty, cannibalism

I really enjoyed this book and it's probably best to go in blind without reading many reviews! Forget everything you think you know about Neanderthals - I can almost guarantee that this book will prove you wrong about them. For example, it's extremely likely that we all have some Neanderthal DNA in us.

I will say that it does discuss racist ideas towards the end, but this is more to show how these views are wrong. I would thoroughly recommend this book to any white supremacists out there as it proves many of our ideas about Neanderthals wrong, and subsequently our ideas about ourselves may very well be wrong too.

The book does an excellent job of discussing the cutting edge science being used in examining fossil remains, and analyzing the evidence, which includes both new finds and very old ones that are being reevaluated. Because so much of the science is still evolving, a portion of her arguments fall into the category of educated speculation, and the author is very conscientious about pointing this out.

However, the book has a clear agenda, which is to debunk the popular and persistent image of Neanderthals as sub-human creatures and a failed species. This is surely a laudable goal, and one the author pursues with clear-eyed determination. I feel that sometimes she puts the agenda before the evidence--stating an idea and then presenting show more evidence that MAY BE INTERPRETED as supporting that idea. Many chapters begin with fictional vignettes, often from the point of view of individual Neanderthals--a hungry child waiting for hunters to return, or a woman giving birth surrounded by friends. This is some of the most beautiful and engaging writing in the book, but is the very definition of getting inside the heads of a vanished people, something which the author herself cautions against because it is...impossible.

That said, it is possible to disagree with this technique, and even the agenda of the book itself, and still get an enormous amount of useful information out of it. I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, because of its thoroughness, its detailed explanations, its passion, and the fact that it's current (it came out in 2020). show less