Book Review: Kindred, by Sykes

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, is hands-down the best of books about Neanderthals that I have read, and I’ve read a few. Although Dr. Sykes benefits from having the most recent information, she masterfully deals with that information, contextualizing it wonderfully for the reader in terms of reassessing older work (carbon dating adjustments, early archaeological practices or lack thereof), situating individual sites within the larger picture, trying to understand what hasn’t been found or what didn’t survive over more than 40,000 years ago in the archaeological record, and how what we know would have been lived experience for Neanderthals. If you have any interest in Neanderthals, human evolution, ancient peoples, or archaeology, get this book. 

I have only two minor items that I wish she had engaged with more. One is the extinction of the Neanderthals, which is of course THE big question. She does point out it’s difficult to know exactly, and that, given the dates we have, it isn’t certain that the last Neanderthals were in southern Spain. She also points out how, over their 400,000 year run, they survived many eras of climate change, so reducing their extinction to one item and where that one item is climate change is not a sufficient answer. 

The other item is that I wish she had a few more maps, but specifically for Neanderthal's existence over time with the aforementioned climate change. She does have a fantastic map inside the front flap, and she also has an evolutionary tree inside the back flap. But I find evolutionary trees somewhat lacking and problematic in that the X-axis is, well what is it, really only the Y-axis has a clear unit (time). If similar enough species are meeting, they’re mating. That’s why islands are so interesting for evolution, you don’t meet anyone off-island (I mean like Darwin and the Galapagos, or Hawaii). Geography plays a huge role here. As does time and climate change: early humans move into an area, over millennia the climate changes, a glacier moves between what are now two groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, they no longer meet, and eventually you have Neanderthals and Denisovans (in theory). Evolutionary trees are not the best way to display the information: although they have time they lack geography, and geography is a key component of the story, of the outcomes in the data. 

Overall, it is a great book, and there were two items that particularly interested me. 

Mousterian- and Keilmesser-making Neanderthal knappers lived at the same time, used both Levallois and Discoid for flake production and hunted similar species. Nonetheless, they held totally different ideas on what a biface was, from how it should be made to resharpening methods. Clearly there was a cultural border of some sort, but unpicking whether it was to do with populations who never came into contact, or something more subtle, remains a significant challenge. (p. 117)

Image by Tom Björklund, between pp. 208-209.

To me, especially after reading another great prehistoric humans book on the origin of Indo-European languages, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Dr. David Anthony, strongly suggests not just different cultures, but different languages. 

The other suggests a route to music and rhythm, although this is not a new idea for Neanderthals (for instance with Dr. Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals but also Dr. Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music).

They would have heard how a cobble with good structure calls out when struck; felt with their body the right angle and force to hit a core just so. (p. 136)

Great books, all of them. 

The End of Google

Google used to have a mantra, as much as massive global corporations can have mantras: "don't be evil." But the people in charge got rid of it after 18 years. It was now okay to be evil. 

More recently, they hired Timnit Gebru to focus on ethical AI issues, yet when she did, they fired her. Apparently, the people in charge of Google's AI want unethical AI.

And on a more personally noticeable level, they changed their mobile search app. No longer is it streamlined and simple, emphasizing speed and focus and, one hoped, accuracy and usefulness of the results. Now it's a news app with a general search function included. This in itself is not a huge problem, what they pass off as news is. About half of the stories are trashy clickbait, not designed to inform but instead designed to manipulate the inbuilt curiosity of the human mind and create "engagement" and advertising revenue. So it's no longer about providing reliable and useful information to the user, it's about providing the user to the advertisers. Much like was said of television advertising, "if the product is free, you're the product."

How this is not a major blow to their original branding, I don't know. Perhaps the DoubleClick people have taken over and they don't care. At this rate, I am seriously debating dropping Chrome completely, I had started using it years ago for its security features. 

I don't mean that Google will suddenly cease to exist. The Google we used to have, however, is gone. The thing with the search app is so upsetting, and the clickbait is so trashy and so transparent, that I am motivated to write a blog post about it. You know it's bad if I'm writing about it. 

Pokemon, Homage, Uri Geller and KISS

I had noticed that a psychic-type Pokemon was holding spoons, which reminded me of Uri Geller, the illusionist who would bend spoons and pretend to be a psychic (and people took him seriously). Long-time Pokemon fans will know that, yes, this was homage, and there's a legal story where Geller had the card blocked for many years so it wasn't printed, and he has recently recanted which is how I learned about it. 

Interestingly, considering homage, the other two forms of this Pokemon (that makes sense for Pokemon, otherwise don't worry about it) also have Japanese names that are homage to Japanese magicians. None of this is apparent in English, though. 

Additionally, and I don't follow Pokemon news so I missed the announcement (but noticed the Pokemon), there is also a Pokemon which is an homage to the band KISS, with its over-the-top style.

What I find interesting, besides more homage, is that to me both of these speak to the culture of the USA in the early 1980s, which is a long time ago, yet here they are in Pokemon. 

What is the 20th‐century French Revolution?

 Apparently, it is the food processor! A friend of mine pointed me towards this and it's too good to not share. A lot of technologies get hyped pretty heavily, I think the Segway electric scooter thing was going to revolutionize everything (I forgot how to spell that, it isn't "segue"), but I didn't expect to see this level of excitement for a food processor--possibly because I grew up in an era with food processors.

It has been labeled, and not without justice, the 20th‐century French Revolution. It is the equivalent of an electric blender, electric mixer, meat grinder, food sieve, potato ricer and chef's knife rolled into one. Its invention, in the minds of serious cooks, ranks with that of the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex, wastebaskets, contour sheets and disposable diapers. It has, in many minds, rendered the electric blender a hopeless antique, and we are willing at any time to relegate our old faithful to the Smithsonian.

The new mechanical Merlin is a French import known in this country is the Cuisinart Food Processor. It is a multifaceted marvel that has, as the saying goes, more uses than money. It blends, slices, grinds, grates and purées, or, as one kitchen enthusiast put it, “does everything except sweep floors, wash dishes and talk back.” 

(From the New York Times Archive, article titled "Kitchen Help", by Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey, from March 16, 1975.)

As a communication scholar, seeing the food processor compared to the printing press is interesting. I'd say it is a rather hilarious comparison, except that the article goes on to say, quoting, I think, a French food writer...

“The French are just getting to the point,” one of them said, “where they are willing to invest in something more mechanical in the kitchen than an electric hand beater. I have lots of friends with servants who refuse to install an electric dishwasher. As everywhere else, the age of the servant is on its way out in France. Five years ago almost anybody with slightly above average means could afford the cheap kitchen labor offered them in the form of Spanish and Portuguese cooks, mostly female. But that's coming to an end. Until now the French have simply not thought in terms of kitchen aids but in terms of kitchen help.”

Servants! It looks like there is a really interesting issue there with gender, class, and nationality, as well as technology.

Edit: Could it have been the 20th century French Revolution because, like a guillotine of the previous French Revolution, it chops things with a blade? (I don't think that's what the writer was going for, though.)

Pokémon GO Homage

 Bruce Lee! Jackie Chan!

These two Pokémon in Pokémon GO don't look anything like the actors / martial arts experts they are named after, but that's not how the visual gestalt of Pokémon works. These two are fighting-type Pokémon, and "hitmon" is probably supposed to sound like "hit-man", not as in assassin, but as in "hit a person" as in martial arts (a bit rough, as martial arts is about much more than just hitting people). When you then see "Lee" and "Chan", it's clear this is an homage to the martial arts greats of movie fame, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.