Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
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8 April 2022
Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written a monumental tour-de-force on Homo neanderthalensis in Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art which nevertheless remains accessible to someone new to the subject. This book probably would've gotten lost in my backlog reading list if not for Dig Ventures archaeology book club, which gave me a chance to interact directly with the author, Becky, via Zoom. Although I still didn't quite finish it before the event last week.
Sykes makes several departures from scholarly tomes that added to the books readability. She includes few footnotes, no endnotes, and the bibliography is online. She also weaves the historical stories of discoveries and dig sites into the discussion of the information gleaned from them. And the short fictional narratives at the beginning of each chapter add literary color to what could have been a dry subject. Neanderthals have been studied for nearly two centuries but the genetic analysis of their DNA by Svante Pääbo and others has only come in the past two decades. Sykes knits all the pieces together: animal, skin and bone processing, stone tools (lithics), burial practices, woodworking, fire usage, interbreeding with Homo sapiens and Denisovans, ice ages and interstitials, geography, etc. Of the books I've read this year so far this one's definitely at the top!
