One of the most important things emphasised by Sykes is that Neanderthals occupied both space and time. They lived from about 250,000 years ago until their "extinction" 40,000 years ago. They were widespread geographically. Fossils have been found in Gibralter and in Britain, and as far east as Iraq. They would have lived in very diverse environments and ecologies. Thus to talk about Neanderthals as a single thing is inaequate. Their cultures, clothes, food and habits would have been varied, and so would their physique. Sykes writes:
Sometimes regional climate might have directly influenced anatomy. Southern European Neanderthals were to some degree insulated from the cold (although not always from aridity) and stringly, cthose from the Near East have less heavily built, thinner bodies. But if Neanderthal physique was affected by physical activity, this difference might also be reflecting how local ecology influenced levels of mobility... males from Europe had more developed lower legs, those in the Near East had stronger thighs, pointing to variation in either how much they moved around or the kind of terrarin. In women... the difference is even greater.
This quote illustrates a point that Sykes repeatedly makes. We need to understand Neanderthals in the context of their place and time. Through the 200,000 or more years they lived, their skills, knowledge, culture and technology developed. While traditionally they have been thought of as living in arctic conditions, Sykes points out "Neanderthals should equally be thought of as creatures of Mediterranean woodland". Thus we cannot think of them as stagnant intellectually or culturally. Indeed, as Sykes shows, Neanderthals were far from the stupid, slow creatures of popular Victorian myth. Instead they were skilled, artistic and capable of adapting and surviving in a myriad of places. She writes:
These were neither unsophisticated nor fixed and unvarying people. Theirs was a dynamic dance with stone, waltzing to different rhythms that merged external factors with ideas, choices, foibles. Elemental boundaries - what the geology made possible or prevented - surely imposed constraints, but thanks to technical mastery and a laser focus on what they wanted, creative responses were possible. As routinely as breathing, Neanderthals paid attention to their rock: selecting the choicest types, playing with novel ways to fragment, shifting concepts and skills as needed.
Here Sykes is talking about the evolution of Neanderthal stone tools. But she also writes about how they fixed stone points to wood, using natural materials as glue. This points to another fascinating aspect of the book, which is how it illuminates scientific methods and modern archaeology. With few remains of Neanderthals left, archaeologists have to use other indicators to learn about how they lived. From tiny remnants of rock to marks on walls and stones, and scratches on bones and teeth, scientists unpick information that tells us that Neanderthals picked their teeth to clean them and probably buried their dead. They tended to prefer fallen and dead wood to freshly cut green wood for their fires and collected it from around a kilometre from their camps. They had fires that were frequently in the same place through generations, and knew how to clean skins and furs.
Much of what we also know is learnt from comparative anthropology. Sykes tells us when and how Neanderthals may have had similar cultures, technologies or behaviours to nomadic hunter-gatherers who survived into modern times. While Neanderthals did prefer fallen wood for their fires, sometimes they behaved like "Athabaskan and Yupiit peoples" in Alsaka and Kamchatka, who "drag entire standing dead or recently fallen trees back" to their camps. At one Neanderthal site, Abric Romani, "Neanderthals did bring some larger branches to hearths, and there may even be evidence of a woodpile of sorts".
I have my own example of this comparative anthropology from my recent reading! One of the things we know about Neanderthals, according to Sykes' book, is that they held their meat in their teeth and used stone knives to cut the meat, leaving scratches on their teeth. Even children suffered. I recently read a fascinating book called An African in Greenland by the Togolese author Tété-Michel Kpomassie. Kpomassie describes being with the Innuit on his first trip in the 1960s and he and them holding whale meat in their teeth while cutting upward with a knife!
One final thing about the Neanderthals. They must have moved enormous distances. Sykes shows how we can piece together the travels of the nomads who returned to camps over and over again. But the DNA we can now extract also shows that there weere "continental-scale movements of lineages". We know that early humans often moved long distances. But the Neanderthals did too. This, says Sykes, was "likely to be an incremental process rather than anything like modern notions of migration" but it led to major "upheavels" and the eventual isolation of different Neanderthal populations.
All these facts are fascinating. But what do they tell us? Partly they tell us that ancient humans were not the cave men of popular legend, but intelligent, cultural beings. The myth that somehow modern White European culture is the peak of evolutionary existence is undermined by showing just how intelligent early peoples were. In the 160 or so years since the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossil, scientific developments and the breaking down of dated ideas, has helped give us a much better understanding of our ancestors. It has also helped us understand how our ancestors reacted to other humans, including Neanderthals. We know they interbred and we know they lived in proximity for thousands of years. Learning about Neaderthals means also learning about us. Rebecca Wragg Sykes' Kindred is a brilliant introduction to our fellow humans.
Related Reviews
Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived
Mithen - After the Ice: A Global Human History
Terray - Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies
Balter - The Goddess & the Bull: Çatalhöyük An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation
Sahlins - Stone Age Economics
Miles - The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain
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