The Neanderthals Rediscovered (Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse)

The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story
Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse
Thames and Hudson
Nonfiction, Anthropology/Archaeology
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Neanderthal. Caveman. Ever since the first discoveries of primitive hominins and early reconstructions, these terms have been tossed around as pejoratives, expressing brutish stupidity and dinosaur-like obsolescence. The proof, of course, is that Homo sapiens has survived to invent the very archaeology that renders our extinct relatives as inferiors. If we weren't smarter, weren't stronger, weren't faster and more clever and overall just plain better and more blessed beings, we'd be the bones in the caves and they'd be the ones excavating our tools and wondering about us, right? In recent years, new discoveries and investigative techniques have upended nearly everything we thought we knew about Homo neanderthalensis, the iconic "caveman" relatives who once spread across Europe and Asia before disappearing into the mists of time. Just what were Neanderthals like? Where did they come from and why did they vanish... and is there anything other than old bones and stone tools left of them today? And, given what we've learned, is it really fair or accurate to treat their name as a synonym for stupidity?

REVIEW: In the foreword, the authors mention that the book was supposed to have gone to press earlier than it did (in 2015), but that various factors ended up holding it up... and even in that brief delay, much of what they'd written had to be rewritten, or at least adjusted, to account for new discoveries, breakthroughs, and theories. I can only imagine where things stand in the scientific community in 2024. Even when it was published, though, it was clear that popular cultural images of the Neanderthal as a knuckle-dragging, club-swinging, misogynistic monster were about as accurate as the Flintstones in depicting our prehistoric ancestors and relatives. From missteps in early reconstruction and investigations to biases on race (and species), the history of prehistoric study has wended its way slowly and circuitously toward something approaching the truth, though of course we probably will never know the whole truth unless time travel becomes a thing (and fiction informs us that that's frankly more trouble than it's probably worth). The authors recount both the history (as understood) of the human/hominin diaspora that created Neanderthals, early "modern" humans, and other relatives known and unknown, and the history of discoveries and theories that have shaped our understanding of our lost kin. Sometimes the recitations can feel a bit dry and technical, and once in a while it seemed they were dismissing or downplaying hypotheses and ideas without really getting into why, but overall it paints a fascinating, if naturally (sometimes frustratingly) incomplete, picture of a lost species that was far more like us than many H. sapiens are comfortable admitting... for if we allow that Neanderthals were also capable of many of the things we think of as exclusively ours, that they were not obviously or inherently lesser beings, we might have to consider that we, too, could follow them into oblivion with the next roll of the evolutionary dice.

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