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Kindred

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This is a comprehensive history of everything to do with Neanderthals, from first discovery to current research. I found it very interesting, although some parts were a little dry. I have to admit there were parts I found a little too complicated to understand, so if you're a complete newbie to the topic it might not be the best book for you (I feel like I should have read something a little more basic before trying this one) but Sykes clearly knows her stuff and is incredibly passionate about it.

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I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology, so I already had a fascination and background in the human sciences and evolution. The find the whole concept of neanderthals absolutely fascinating. The fact that another species of similar intelligence could live side by side with our ancestors, that we could even share DNA, is amazing. I really enjoyed the discussions of DNA and homo dapiren genetics and how they can shape our. behavior and susceptibility for certain diseases.

However, while most of the subject matter here really is incredibly insightful and interesting, I did find it a little hard to get through at times. There is a lot of information to pack in here, and at times I found the writing to get bogged down in over explaining things. The writing also isn't the easiest to wade through. You'll learn a lot here but be prepared to put in the work to get the most out of this book.

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Enjoyable and informative read that peels back the Neanderthal stereotype. The book is very detailed, sometimes to a fault. It can alienate a reader unfamiliar with the subject or jargon, however the overall takeaways are worth it. This is a great read if you want to learn and change the way you see Neanderthals.

* Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

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A compelling and gorgeously rendered introduction to Neanderthal life - our ancestors have never felt closer

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There is a pop culture influenced view of Neanderthal’s as little more than brutish, violent cavepeople who grunted at one another while hunting for their food. But over the years, those studying our ancestors have discovered more and more about these mysterious people, and in Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes – contemporary British Palaeolithic archaeologist – gives us comprehensive, detailed information about Neanderthals, presenting a view that would be new to most of the general public.

Did I understand everything discussed in this book?

No.

Did that detract from my enjoyment and interest?

Weirdly, no.

Sykes makes the Neanderthals and everything we know about them as accessible as possible, but like many science based books, there are going to be aspects that either go over your head if you’re not in that field, or that perhaps you simply aren’t majorly interested in. For the most part, even if I didn’t completely understand something (and there is Google available for that!) I could still follow along and get a solid idea of what Sykes is talking about.

The book is split into different sections, and depending on where your own curiosity takes you, there might be sections that are a bit more dry than others. Personally, I was kind of glad to come out of the section regarding the items and tools found with Neanderthals, though it was still good information to have and tied into other areas. The parts I was most fascinated by were more to do with how they lived, in regards to life, death and travel. There’s also an interesting mini-discussion regarding Neanderthal remains, where countries have requested remains be returned to them, but Sykes makes the point that Neanderthals lived in a borderless world (as far as we understand borders and countries anyway), and the places where they died wouldn’t necessarily be where they lived.

Interestingly, Sykes also draws comparisons with primate species, especially bonobos, to show how Neanderthals might have lived with less violence and more compassion than previously assumed. I also really enjoyed the exploration of what childhood might have meant to Neanderthals – the rate that they aged, how they may have carried children too young to walk, whether or not children would have had toys, and how much those ‘toys’ may have been a way for them to learn the lifestyle at a young age, with smaller versions of Neanderthal tools found that might have been a way for children to learn while playing.

There is a lot of information here and it can get fairly dense in parts, but Sykes does make it as informative and engaging as possible. I especially liked the chapter openings, written almost like novels, giving glimpses into what Neanderthal life might have been like day to day. It was also fascinating to learn about the variety of remains found, and how we can get so much information from what little we have.

It’s wonderful to see such an undertaking, and an attempt to engage the wider public on this topic. If this is an area you have any curiosity about, Kindred is, without a doubt, worth picking up.

My thanks to Bloomsbury for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley. Views remain my own.

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This is a fascinating book covering all that is known of Neanderthals.
The chapters each begin with a very appealing lyrical scene setting. There is a great deal of research and science in each chapter and inevitably some conjecture.

How accurate some of the conclusions drawn are, I have not the skill to know but the author shares a great deal of knowledge with the reader, with copious footnotes.

I enjoyed this book, although the text got a little dense at times.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review. All views expressed are my own.

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Dig deep into your family tree. Go beyond written history. What do you find? Probably a Neanderthal or two somewhere along the line! "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" aims to dispel the image of our distant cousins as brutal, grunting creatures with little resemblance to us, and it does it very well. It's written beautifully and is very easy to read. Long live our Neanderthal genes!

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

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Neanderthal is a three hours drive from where I live, in the middle of the Ruhr District in Germany. Many years ago, we learnt in school that Homo neanderthalensis were brutes, so much less than our distant forefathers and rightfully extinguished.

The last 30 years came to different conclusions, and this wonderfully comprehensive book tells you all about it from early history in 19th century up to the cutting edge of research. Rebecca Sykes has a literary voice just at the right spot between academic and popular science. She’s hip-deep into research, building enough trust about her knowledge that one can let go any distrust and flow with her analysis.

The book is neither a short (shouldering 400 pages) nor an easy one, it still needs some concentration to read through the many facets of her research topic, like tools, clothes, communication, peregrinations, art, or innovations. The only aspect that I’d have liked to read more about are findings about Neanderthal language – but that’s just my linguistic curiosity which would lead me into heavily speculative terrain there.

Other than that, the book provides a holistic view about our Kindred. Because that’s what they are: Neanderthal contribute 2-4% of their genome to us modern humans. There are suggested links to helping with “digestive problems, urinary infections, diabetes, and over clotting of blood,” but also with adapting to lower levels of UV and seasonal winter darkness, and thermal efficiencies.

They were clever, technologically inventive and adaptable to changing environments over the course of more than 350,000 years through ice and warm ages, widely spread from Western Europe to central Asia.

I was impressed by the attention of detail researchers when they sieved through enormous amounts of tiny fractures to find out knapping waste pieces, puzzling them – helped by computers – to spearheads. Knapping is the one outstanding capability of Neanderthals, and it is analyzed in each and every detail – maybe a little bit too deep for my taste.

It still remains a mystery why the Neanderthal population died out. They were on eye level with Homo sapiens regarding intelligence and creativity. They’ve survived multiple climatic changes before. Was it competition for natural resources, or a disadvantage in social skills? After all, it might have been ill luck that they vanished.

Highly recommended for readers interested in our distant kindreds, the Neanderthals!

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Neanderthals are no longer considered to be the “dullard losers” but are now considered as our adaptable and successful ancient relative.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes @LeMoustier tells a great story in “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love and Art”. @BloomsburyBooks
(Short review in Twitter)

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This was a very enjoyable and eye opening read. I knew little to nothing about Neanderthals before reading this book. I was surprised to discover how skilled they were in crating there tools and how rich and varied their culture was. The methods used to reach these conclusions are interesting in themselves. Attempting to understand how Neanderthals thought is to touch the unknowable, it is so easy to our similarities and assume that they are like us. They are not us and we cannot begin to understand the world as seen though their eyes. To call them brutish or compassionate is meaningless, we are projecting our own values onto them.
This book occasional gets itself bogged down in the technicalities of who discovered what and when, but generally it has a nice easy flow. Many of the chapters start with a short passage to add a bit of colour to the text. Often fantastical, poetical, lyrical and imaginative, at times they crossed the line a but too far into whimsy for me. but some were very interesting and useful. Especially those at the beginning of the book, attempting to illustrate the vast expanse of time. The vision of mothers and daughters holding hands in a line that spans hundreds of thousands of years really helped to put things into perspective for me, but not all of these sections worked so well..
This is a long book and perhaps that did not work in its favour, but it is well written and clearly explained. I could absolutely see this a a TV series.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book

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A fascinating topic and Wragg Sykes knows her stuff so is well positioned to give this current survey of where Neanderthal research stands now on. But there are places where a stronger editorial hand might have improved this: some technical terms are barely explained or are left to the reader to gauge by implication from the text, and there are places where the author's suppositions are not really held up by the evidence. I was also far less sure about the opening vignettes to each chapter which are essentially fictional scenes that are supposed to make the Neanderthals 'just like us'. But niggles aside, this is an eye-opening read, up-to-date and informed by the latest research.

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I grew up being taught that Neanderthal was somehow a very primitive version of us, one that was such a bad draft that nothing of them survived in us, their DNA lost forever when Homo Sapiens took over..It's been fascinating to see them rehabilited over the past few years, when bits of information kept coming regularly: they left behind musical instruments (so maybe they did have a culture!), their tools were not as basic as we thought (so they showed dexterity and engineering!), they interbred with modern early humans. Rebecca Wragg Sykes does a great job at going through the history of our knowledge of Neanderthal, and explaining what we know about them. The book is an interesting mix of scholarly research, and lyrical texts that begin each chapter, to aid the readers project themselves in the environment and daily life of Neanderthal. For a book aimed at the common reader, it is at times too scholarly and too detailed (the chapter about flakes and weapons felt particularly long), but it is overall incredibly enjoyable, and you can feel her enthusiasm and passion in every paragraph.

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Dying out around 40,000 years ago, it is easy to assume that we know relatively little about the Neanderthals. Almost 400 pages later, this book tells a different story.

We learn that Neanderthals matured faster, had larger noses and eyes; and they weighed about 15% more. They possessed genes for differing eye colours, skin tones and hair, but it is impossible to know how those genes would have been expressed in specific individuals.

Studies of muscles show gender differences, as males have stronger upper arms consistent with spear throwing, whilst women have stronger lower arms consistent with double handed hide scrapping.

We see evidence that Neanderthals cared for injured members of their groups, and that they showed inventiveness in stone knapping. They selected specific materials for different tasks, they used glues and they added materials like beeswax to resin in order to change its properties.

They ate varied diets (ie not just meat), and they erected temporary structures with wooden poles. They applied coloured pigments, and on at least one occasion they constructed a circle of stalagmites which may show a community, or spiritual dimension.

There are, of course, many questions that we cannot answer. Did they use language? Did they have feelings, as we would recognise them?

Nevertheless, by the end of the book an image of the Neanderthals emerges which suggests similarity and continuity with Homo Sapiens, rather than the discontinuity and primitiveness which experts have previously argued for. This changing view of the Neanderthals raises questions about scholars’ motives and assumptions during the colonial era, and the author tentatively ponders whether racism was a factor.

At the end of the book some fascinating ethical questions arise. Scientists are beginning to splice Neanderthal DNA with other species and it will not be long before someone contemplates a Neanderthal-Primate hybrid. Are Neanderthals sufficiently ‘human’ for this to be unethical human experimentation? There are some serious questions which need some urgent consideration.

My experience of the book was a little marred in places by distracting stylistic flourishes. For example, the antiquity of the era is explained by telling us that ‘our solar system (was) light years away from its current position in a never-ending galactic waltz’ (Kindle 3%). After a while some of the prose became jarring.

However, overall, I found the book a fascinating and thought provoking catalogue of information about the Neanderthals.

(These are honest comments on an advanced review copy of the text).

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