5/28/2023 0 Comments Kindred neanderthal book reviewIn titling her book Kindred, she underlines that Neanderthals are kin to us, worthy of not just reconsideration but respect. Passionately pro-Neanderthal, Wragg Sykes sums up the case for their relative sophistication on the basis of considerable evidence from archaeology and related disciplines. In The Smart Neanderthal, for example, the evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson attacks what he calls “the paradigm of Neanderthal inferiority.” Relying in part on evidence that Neanderthals caught birds, ate them, and used their feathers for adornment, he insists that they were, in fact, “our cognitive equals.” It joins other recent titles in advancing the still-controversial case that Neanderthals were more cognitively complex than the old cave man conceptions suggest. Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art is part of this revisionist reckoning. Alongside fossilized bones and stone tools, we now have evidence of symbolic architecture, personal adornment, cave art-and, perhaps most intriguing, the persistence of Neanderthal DNA in our own genome. Discoveries over the last decade or so have narrowed the distance, intellectual and otherwise, between Neanderthals and modern humans.
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