Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

The handful of remains a hundred years ago whispering stories of another kind of human have today swelled to thousands of fossils from many, many sites. They represent a couple of hundred individuals, from newborn babies to old adults,

However, it’s now clear that early H. sapiens were already many thousands of kilometres into East Asia probably before 100 ka, adapting to completely different ecologies. To reach China somewhere around 120 to 80 ka, Sumatra by 73 to 63 ka and cross to Australia at least 65 ka, they must have walked over mountains,

Though Neanderthals remained physically distinct even in their last visible skeletal remains, the scale and repetition of interbreeding, plus the range of retained genes in us, means they were – and are – human.

The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic.8

Samuel Edwards.

Quite simply, because they were invested in a world of hierarchies that placed them at the top.

Right from the start, the Neanderthals were embedded in scientific justifications for white racial supremacy.

But the effects lingered: prominent anthropologist Carlton Coon describes Caucasians as the ‘Alpha’ race and Aboriginal Australians as ‘Omega’ in his 1962 book The

Important history lesson for equity challenges of today.

This matters because heritage is fundamentally about identity, and archaeology provides material evidence legitimising or disproving contested pasts.

I wish this book dove more into the "art" left behind by Neanderthal humans.

Human origins as a discipline is rooted in the belief that it pursues questions of global relevance, on behalf of all people. But Western interests are often privileged,

Shared symbolic networks reflecting connections with far-flung communities are what define the post-Neanderthal world.

Since the current interglacial began around 12,000 years ago, we’ve largely basked in the kind climates of a world where ice caps are dormant. Without the Industrial Revolution there probably would have been a few thousand more golden years before the mercury began juddering downwards.

Wow. A geologic timeframe meets the new world that humans are creating. Reference the book Sapiens, end notes "the animal that became a god"