Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

Excellent, fascinating and up to date overview of the rapidly changing story of our hominin cousins.

I have become increasing interested in deep history, both within the realms of written history and beyond it. There is simply so much time beyond it, and we keep on pushing back key milestones.

Cleopatra, of Julius Ceaser and Mark Anthony fame is closer to the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. That is not so far from the beginning of written history. Yet it is not close to the key migrations of Homo Sapiens that would replace those that where there before, of both sapien and our cousin species. So many lives, so much hardship and tenacity to survive and thrive through eons.

The author is a true expert, and is clearly passionate about the subject. She goes all out here, and if you get one chance to write a popular science book about your passion why not? The science is explained clearly and from a position of authority. The story of the discoveries and the history of the area is covered well too. She is very much about changing the perception from bulky inbred dullards to successful inventive people. She mostly succeeds.

The book is structured with the more prosaic chapters up front, you will learn a lot about stones. Only towards the end will you learn of the headline grabbing juicy subjects, cannibalism? Inbreeding? Cross-species breeding? Extinction? yep, nice. Like Game of thrones in the stone age! I think she wanted to get across the life, death, and art sections before the sensational stuff that often pulls people in, fair enough, though they were the best ones !

Neandertals really were successful, for eons across a huge range. They were inventive and tenacious. They had complex technologies. But small societies. Inbreeding was clearly common. They may have had art. It is not clear to me that this is a fact. The comparison to Homo sapien art from the same times is truly striking. Different league.

The cross species breeding is an incredible story. The insights from genetics is profound, winning a deserved Nobel Prize this year. The story of the Neandertal (and early sapien populations) extinctions is tantalisingly unfinished. We can't say why. But we all suspect the real reason, at least to an extent, we killed them all. I wonder if in the later waves of sapiens there was a change, maybe genetic, maybe cultural, to never stop. To not live in harmony but to exploit. The later waves did not interbreed, they replaced. It seems to me they drove extinctions. We still are. (As mentioned in "The Sixth Extinction"https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction)

The book is a little overwritten at times (I rolled my eyes a few times), and the truly poetic epigraphs wont be for everyone. The Neandertal cheerleading is loudest at the beginning, asserting that they were less violent than Sapiens, and that they were "master geologists" (for moving some stones a few k's) and the "first archaeologists" (for digging up parts of a cave). Though it is more measured when looking into the art and extinction possibilities later on. It would have been easy to make wild claims there. Some of the language remains technical, and a bit ridiculous to lay readers - so much talk of "techno-complexes" that all I could see were Neandertals gurning and pre-historic clubs!

Overall I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in Neandertals or deep hominin history!