Since their discovery 150 years ago, Neanderthals have gone from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. This book sheds new light on where they lived, what they ate, and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that researchers have discovered. In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland, and reveals the Neanderthal you don’t know, our ancestor who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. Every library needs its science up to date Sykes delivers.' Kindred is important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.'- The New York Times Book Review Accumulated from the approximately 200 known Neanderthal sites, the information that Sykes evocatively and enthusiastically presents enables readers to appreciate Neanderthals as sentient creatures, and possibly imagine themselves sharing, Jean Auel–like, a Pleistocene encounter with them. Possible burial practices indicate their reactions to death. Sykes explains that the bones show that Neanderthals were shorter, heavier, and more muscular than modern humans, while their tools reflect a nomadic hunting culture. They left a legacy of bones, stone tools, wood tools, hearths, and other artifacts that testify to their bestriding Europe and Asia for a prior 350 millennia. Sykes cites the discovery that the human genome contains 1.8 to 2.6 percent of Neanderthal DNA, showing that there was interhuman breeding before the Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago.

A paleoanthropologist who has studied Homo neanderthalensis, Sykes summarizes current knowledge of this extinct human species, which has been recognized to be ancestral to Homo sapiens since the 1856 discovery in Germany’s Neander Valley of an anatomically unusual skull. Neanderthals’ lives have been revealed through ever-improving archaeological technologies that provided data that challenge conceptions of Neanderthals as evolutionary failures and portray them, instead, as successful adapters to their environments and cognitive, emotional beings to whom we can feel akin.

Kindred neanderthal book review