Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

further irony is that long-standing claims that early H. sapiens possessed some intrinsic superiority are far from tenable. The Oase man’s people went extinct in Europe, and are instead closer to today’s Indigenous Americans and East Asians. Even more striking is the ‘Ust-Ishim man. He lived either just before or just after the deepest genetic division into what would become ancient eastern and western Eurasian H. sapiens lineages. Yet he’s unrelated to almost any living people.7 Furthermore, during the 25,000 years after Oase, it appears that successive Upper Palaeolithic populations totally replaced each other, and were then replaced in their turn by later prehistoric cultures. Parisians, Londoners or Berliners today with ostensibly European heritage have very little connection even to Mesolithic people just 10,000 years ago. The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic.8