In this deeply researched 'twenty-first-century portrait of the Neanderthals' from birth to burial and beyond, palaeolithic archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes smashes stereotypes ... hers are vivid, immersive depictions of Neanderthals from diverse periods and places. One imagines hunting with them, chewing on horse eyeballs, hammering stones into blades. And one pictures Neanderthals encountering our Homo sapiens ancestors, with whom they crossed paths and mated multiple times over a period of more than 100,000 years, as DNA evidence shows.
... intriguing ... Through painstaking forensic analysis of an eclectic collection of fragmented artifacts, and in a manner at times achieving the suspense and excitement of a Hollywood thriller, Ms. Wragg Sykes makes a bold and magnificent attempt to resurrect our Neanderthal kin ... the author enables us to confront a sliver of Borgesian possibility ... The unsung heroes of this detective story are undoubtedly the forensic scientists who helped develop ingenious methods for bringing invisible Neanderthal existence to life.
In her book Kindred Rebecca Wragg Sykes aims to tell a complete new story about Neanderthals. She has done a remarkable job synthesizing thousands of academic studies into a single accessible narrative. From her pages emerge new Neanderthals that are very different from the cartoon figures of old. Kindred is important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.
... it seems we got Neanderthals all wrong. Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s fact-packed but highly readable book puts us right with a superbly authoritative guided tour of much new evidence ... 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). What they reveal is astonishing.
If your ancestry traces back to populations outside sub-Saharan Africa, there's a good chance that your genome includes contributions from Neanderthals. In Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, archaeologist and science writer Rebecca Wragg Sykes explains in splendidly engaging prose why this fact is cause for wonder and celebration ... Occasionally the writing bogs down in details overly numerous and technical for a wide readership ... Make no mistake, though. What Wragg Sykes has produced in Kindred, after eight years of labor, is masterful. Synthesizing over a century and a half of research, she gives us a vivid feel for a past in which we weren't the only smart, feeling bipedal primate alive. That feel comes across sometimes in startlingly fresh ways.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes nevertheless brings something new to this discussion ... The book’s scope is impressive, spanning from the initial discoveries and interpretations of Neanderthals to the diverse aspects of their biology and behavior ... beautifully detailed ... Without forcing the point, Kindred closes by returning to the value of empathy and compassion, arguing that both deserve a more prominent place in our theories about Neanderthals and in our attitudes toward our fellow humans and other sentient creatures.
Wragg Sykes separates perfectly valid and reasonable questions...from the thinking that casts our ancient relatives as 'dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree' ... As an archaeologist with a special interest in the cognitive aspects of stone tool technologies, Wragg Sykes paints a fascinating picture of a field transformed almost beyond recognition over the past 30 years ... An exciting aspect of this book is the way it refreshes our ideas about our own place in hominin evolution.
Deeply involved in these studies herself, Rebecca Wragg Sykes has performed something extraordinary in distilling them into a commanding and wonderfully readable account. Her success is in leaving us with glimpses of real scenes, of imagined individuals and groups going about their daily lives ... One of the more astonishing impacts of Kindred is the obsessional interest in Neanderthals ... This is science with no utilitarian object, no hope of curing a disease, no promised technological leap. It says as much about our own species, now, as Neanderthals themselves. It is curiosity, pure and simple — both rather wonderful and slightly mad.
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.
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 ... 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.
... [a] fine debut ... 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.
