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Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
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About This Book
Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside clichés of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we're obsessed with what makes us special. But, much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination... perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. It is only by understanding them, that we can truly understand ourselves.
Reviews
"From her pages emerge new Neanderthals that are very different from the cartoon figures of old."
"If your ancestry traces back to populations outside sub-Saharan Africa, there's a good chance that your genome includes contributions from Neanderthals."
"Deeply involved in these studies herself, Rebecca Wragg Sykes has performed something extraordinary in distilling them into a commanding and wonderfully readable account."
"Wragg Sykes has made a career studying Neanderthals, and she skillfully lays out a massive amount of information, much of which has turned up over the past few decades ..."
"Wragg Sykes...[draws] together the extraordinary results of such arcane new sciences as fuliginochronology (analysing soot smudges embedded in lumps of carbonate to determine the frequency of human habitation) and micromorphology (the microscopic study of soil and sediment)."
"One imagines hunting with them, chewing on horse eyeballs, hammering stones into blades."
"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."
"Wragg Sykes makes a bold and magnificent attempt to resurrect our Neanderthal kin ..."
"Throughout, Sykes makes the case that Neanderthals were not all that different from Homo sapiens, biologically and behaviorally, and asks the provocative question of 'why we are here and not them.' While she has no conclusive answer to provide, she brings the history of this long-extinct species to life in assured fashion."
"Rebecca Wragg Sykes nevertheless brings something new to this discussion ..."
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