Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery over 160 years ago, they've metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. While 21st century scientific understanding of Neanderthals is complex and fascinating, much remains inaccessible outside the specialist literature.
In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her first-hand experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share this knowledge, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals the Neanderthals as curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they were successful: survivors of over 300,000 years of massive climate change.
At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we're obsessed with what makes us special. Only one kind of human walks Earth today, but histories of our dominance and success aren't the whole truth: many of our pioneering forebears are, in genetic terms, even more extinct than Neanderthals. Moreover, much of what's claimed to define us was also in Neanderthals, our closest relatives, whose DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination... perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality.
Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance. It is only by understanding them, that we can truly understand ourselves.
Author Biography
Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. After a PhD on the last Neanderthals living in Britain, she worked in France at the world-famous PACEA laboratory, Universite de Bordeaux, on topics ranging from Neanderthal landscapes and territories in the Massif Central region of south-east France to examining how they were the first ancient humans to produce a synthetic material and tools made of multiple parts.
Alongside her academic activities, she has also earned a reputation for exceptional public engagement. The public can follow her research through a personal blog and Twitter account, and she frequently writes for the popular media, including the Scientific American and Guardian science blogs. She is also co-founder of the influential Trowelblazers project, which highlights women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists through innovative outreach and collaboration.
@LeMoustier / www.therocksremain.org/
