Dimitra Papagianni

A short but very information packed book about neanderthals that digs a little deeper than most and had much of the current information despite being almost a decade old now. A lot of the information dovetails with what we know of early humanoids outside of the neanderthal themselves and serves as comparison and contrast. It's also generally skeptical (but not entirely dismissive) of the controversial claims about musical instruments and most of the art and funerary rites hypothesised to be connected with neanderthal finds. I found this critical neutrality refreshing, as most books are either too skeptical or entirely credulous.… (more)

This is a brief overview of Neanderthals written by a Palaeolithic and stone tool specialist at Cambridge who wrote her PhD on the Neanderthal. It retells the whole story. You can see how they came about and evolved. Apparently the hand axe is the oldest human tool dating to 1.6 mya and used by multiple human species without much innovation. Neanderthals used their teeth a lot probably in chewing or stripping hides for clothing since they had no needles and thread. Compared to them, modern humans would look like children, just as dogs are adult-puppy versions of wolves, the end result of self-domestication. Neanderthals had speech and were probably quite intelligent, at least in a practical way, symbolic thinking not fully developed. There was tremendous violence most skeletons show blunt force injuries, possibly in encounters with animals, or one another. And they ate one another, at times, but then so do some humans. These were tough people, given a time machine and walking into the dark old-growth forests of Europe, I would be seriously concerned about the natives, but the population density was so thin you may never encounter them. What killed them off remains a mystery, according to this telling. There is an interesting section on Neanderthals in popular culture and an overview of the fiction my favorite being Quest for Fire.… (more)

This might be a (mostly) up to date book about neanderthals, but it focuses on the archaeological record (bones, sites, stone tools, dating of everything vaguely hominid) and relegates all the interesting stuff about Neanderthals (their life-style, diet, burial rituals, social interactions, technology, use of fire, clothing, anything related to DNA) to one superficial chapter at the end of the book. Half the book focuses on the parallel evolution of homo sapiens and neanderthals, issues with fossil sites and dating, and telling the reader who dug up what and what they and everyone else thought about it. While the book covers a variety of hypotheses about neanderthals and why they went extinct, it also leaves out the more interesting hypotheses (e.g. diseases, humans with hunting dogs). The writing was dull and plodding, a bit disorganized and too repetitive. I didn't learn anything new about neanderthals that I hadn't already picked up from a variety of random internet articles. In short, if you want to know about neanderthals, read the Wikipedia article and skip this book.


… (more)