August 10, 2020
Sykes, in her fine debut, draws on her expertise as an anthropologist to create an up-to-date depiction of the Neanderthals as not the “dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree” she thinks they’ve too often been portrayed as, but as “enormously adaptable and even successful ancient relatives.” She demonstrates how cutting-edge science has illuminated numerous aspects of these archaic humans’ lives, from birth (she speculates Neanderthal females acted as midwives for each other during delivery) to death (likely marked by an array of burial rituals). Sophisticated geological and 3D mapping techniques have allowed paleontologists to study minute traces left by the hearth fires around which Neanderthals lived, yielding “the frankly mind-blowing ability to ‘see’ a single evening from more than 90,000 years ago.” Sykes also cites evidence Neanderthals had a meaningful sense of numeracy, a distinct aesthetic tradition, a knack for technological innovation evinced by carefully wrought stone tools, and a far wider diet, including a variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains, than previously assumed. 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.
August 15, 2020
Everything you ever wanted to know about our closest relative. 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. Although not the first, the Neanderthal bones unearthed by German miners in 1856 were the first recognized as different from modern humans. Since some experts insisted that these were simply a contemporary with bone disease, serious study only began at the end of the century after more discoveries. Despite countless popular portrayals, the average Neanderthal was not a hunchbacked caveman: "Somewhat shorter than average," writes the author, "with broader chests and little waists, their limb proportions were also slightly different. Beneath massively muscled thighs were thicker, rounder and slightly curved leg bones...unlike countless inaccurate reconstructions they absolutely walked as upright as us." Dressed properly and passing on a city street, a Neanderthal would attract no attention. Appearing in Europe about 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals possessed impressive hunting skills, a complex social life, and technology as advanced as modern Homo sapiens, who arrived about 50,000 years ago and drove them to extinction 10,000 years ago--for reasons about which Wragg Sykes and her colleagues continue to speculate. Early field researchers carried off bones and tools and discarded everything else. Modern scientists return to old sites and carefully sift through tons of dirt to retrieve bits of vegetation, chemicals, bone fragments, microfossils, pollen, and trash. High-tech scanners and computers pour out a stream of revelations. Scientists scrape plaque from old teeth, put it under the microscope, and learn what they ate, the parasites they harbored, the tools they built, and the smoke they breathed. Many chapters, including 35 pages on the Neanderthal diet, reveal almost too much, but Wragg Sykes clearly loves her subject, so educated readers will have no trouble absorbing the spectacular revelations of modern anthropology. Solid popular science.
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Starred review from September 1, 2020
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. 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. 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 explains that the bones show that Neanderthals were shorter, heavier, and more muscular than modern humans, while their tools reflect a nomadic hunting culture. Possible burial practices indicate their reactions to death. 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. Every library needs its science up to date; Sykes delivers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)