The Age of Wood (Roland Ennos)

The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
Roland Ennos
Scribner
Nonfiction, Anthropology/History/Nature
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Computer Age... looking back, one might think that our history began when we started shaping rocks to tame the world, and our future lies in silicon chips and electricity. But long before the first axes and arrowheads, long before Homo sapiens itself came to be, our ancestors were relying on another natural material with amazingly useful properties, one that continues to underpin our modern world, one so ubiquitous it's often overlooked: wood. Author Roland Ennos explores how trees and wood helped transform us from arboreal apes to space-age humans, and how rediscovering the versatility of timber products might help create a sustainable future.

REVIEW: Due to its generally poor preservation compared to stone artifacts, the importance of wood in our own species's prehistory and the development of civilization has often been glossed over. It's only relatively recently that anthropologists have paid more attention to wooden tool making, a process whose roots can be seen in other great apes today (shaping branches to access food sources like insects or honey, even weaving nests for protection from the elements). When one realizes that wood was essential for mastering fire, an immensely pivotal development, it seems a glaring oversight, but Ennos demonstrates how wood has always been such a common part of our world that we almost don't even see it... and, he argues, we haven't paid enough attention as it has disappeared from more and more of our environment, both artificial and natural. Without mastering wood, our species never would've developed pretty much anything we take for granted now. Even the materials many of us think of as replacing wood - iron, concrete, and the like - depended on wood in some form or another, even just as the charcoal and coke to smelt it. Have we outgrown the need for natural materials like wood, in our age of plastics and synthetics? Not at all; there are still many places where wood and wood products are as good as, even potentially superior to, the often-polluting materials we've created to replace it, not to mention the planetary benefits of growing more (and more diverse, not just monoculture plantations) woodlands and the psychological benefits of reconnecting with forests.
For the most part, this book makes for an interesting tour of wood's uses (and limitations) through prehistory and history, generally centered around "Western" cultures but also looking into other places around the world, such as China and the Americas. There are a few parts where I felt Ennos could've dug a bit deeper - his European roots and perspective seem very much evident throughout, and he also waits until near the very end to even mention issues with biodiversity loss that come with overexploitation of woodlands even before modern machinery made logging so much more devastating to the environment - but overall I found it intriguing.

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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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The Smart Neanderthal (Clive Finlayson)

The Smart Neanderthal: Cave Art, Bird Catching, and the Cognitive Revolution
Clive Finlayson
Oxford University Press
Nonfiction, Anthropology/Archaeology/Nature
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Popular culture has long relegated Neanderthals to the roles of dumb brutes who were outsmarted by the genetically and cognitively superior humans, leading to their extinction. Over the years, various criteria have been put forth to define the so-called "cognitive revolution", the traits that allowed our branch of the family tree to succeed where lesser hominins failed - traits that were generally considered beyond the supposedly slow, shambling Neanderthals. But more recent studies have turned these notions on their ear. For one thing, genetic evidence shows that there was significant interbreeding during the times when the theorized eradication was supposed to occur. For another, far from being our inferiors, the Neanderthals seem to have been our equals, perhaps our superiors, in some important ways. Author Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist, draws on decades of research, both in the caves of Gibraltar and elsewhere where generations of the ancient human relatives lived and beyond in the natural world, to debunk a few particular common myths, with a special interest what the many bird bones found in the dwelling areas can tell us about the life and times of the Neanderthals.

REVIEW: Storytelling is one of our our species' strengths, a way to pass down knowledge and culture, but it can also be one of our weaknesses if the stories we tell, particularly about ourselves, are built on distortions and lies... and once a story takes hold, it can be very, very difficult to get us to revise the narrative. The story of our own origins is perhaps the most entrenched in our cultural consciousness. For a long time, it had everything people love in a story: a hero (us) facing monsters (those lowly, lesser hominin species, who surely must've been little better than base animals) and proving our inherent, even divinely-gifted superiority with victory over all comers. Even those who determined the "other" was not monstrous tended to show their extinction as sadly inevitable due to inherent flaws in their intellects, their brain shapes, their simple lack of being us. This book is not only an interesting update to outdated notions about "inferior" human ancestors (ones which, as he notes, bear reflections of how different H. sapiens groups belittle and malign others of our own species when cultures collide), but an exploration at how limiting it is to look at any one species in isolation. By looking at the other animal remains, particularly the birds, Finlayson recreates the shifting climates that the Neanderthals would've experienced as global conditions shifted, plus some eye-opening insights into how they must've lived and hunted and viewed the world. The author and his son travel to various regions, observing living birds and their habitats and learning how a primitive hominin might have hunted them. Certain species seem to have been taken not to eat, but for their feathers and talons (as evidenced by tool marks on wing bones and signs of polishing and shaping on the claws), hinting at minds that, far from being animalistic and brutish, could conceive of aesthetic decoration, abstract thought, and perhaps even spiritual notions. That this activity predates the arrival of "modern" humans in their regions nixes the idea that these were just learned and imitated from our "superior" ancestors. Through it all, the author's love of both Neanderthals and the natural world (which really are one and the same, all things considered, as we and other hominins are ultimately animals of Earth) shines clearly, an infectious enthusiasm.

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