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.