Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Time is devious. It flees frighteningly fast, or oozes so slowly we feel it as a burden, measured in heartbeats. Each human life is marbled with memories and infused by imaginings, even as we exist in a continuously flowing stream of ‘now’. We are beings swept along in time, but to emerge and view the whole coursing river defeats us.

Ecologically they could shift gear, adapting to whatever was on offer, from palm dates to olives, tortoise to gazelle; even on the fringes of Arabia, giant camels. The only sort of country in western Eurasia lacking evidence so far for Neanderthals is true wetlands.