The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burial, and Murder
Douglas Preston
Grand Central Publishing
Nonfiction, Archaeology/True Crime/History/Sociology/True Stories
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: A string of grisly murders in Florence, Italy and an investigation hijacked by politics and personal agendas... An ancient Egyptian tomb of unrivaled size and scope unearthed after long being dismissed as insignificant... One of the longest-running and most expensive treasure hunts in history on a small Canadian island... The possible evolutionary roots of online vitriol run amok... These and more stories, drawn from the articles and research of author and journalist Douglas Preston, are gathered in this volume.
REVIEW: One of the great things about books is the ability to vicariously experience a bigger, bolder, wider life that is remotely possible for an unremarkable, broke lardlump like myself. Here, Douglas Preston republishes (with updates and annotations) articles from his long history of journalism and related research on all manner of topics, proving yet again that if reality may not always be stranger than fiction, it can sure give fiction a run for its money. He manages to bring the subjects, the people, the controversies, and more to life in his words, and generally writes complete enough articles that one isn't unduly frustrated by omissions or obvious blind spots (as in some article-based books I've read). The updates are also fairly up to date, as the book was published in December 2023 and I'm reviewing this audiobook in April 2024. From the amateur paleontologist who discovered a once-in-a-lifetime window into the day that ended the dinosaurs to investigations into why so many online communities seem to build themselves around hate and punishment of the perceived Other, from the Oak Island "money pit" to the deserts of the American Southwest and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, Preston's tales take the reader around the world and across time to encounter all manner of mysteries, controversies, and colorful characters. It made for an enjoyable read (or listen, this being another audiobook selection), and a reminder of how very small and pointless my own particular existence has been, is, and doubtless will continue to be until it ceases.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Riley Black) - My Review
Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws (Adrienne Mayor) - My Review
The Lost City of the Monkey God (Douglas Preston) - My Review
Showing posts with label archaeology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label archaeology. Show all posts
Friday, April 19, 2024
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
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.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Smart Neanderthal (Clive Finlayson) - My Review
Last Ape Standing (Chip Walter) - My Review
Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk) - My Review
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.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Smart Neanderthal (Clive Finlayson) - My Review
Last Ape Standing (Chip Walter) - My Review
Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk) - My Review
Thursday, July 6, 2023
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.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Unbound (Richard L. Currier) - My Review
Last Ape Standing (Chip Walter) - My Review
Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk) - My Review
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.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Unbound (Richard L. Currier) - My Review
Last Ape Standing (Chip Walter) - My Review
Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk) - My Review
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