Book Helps See Neanderthals as Complex People – 04/07/2022 – Darwin and God

20 years later and there has been a lot of writing about human evolution, I still think the most complex thing about this craft is portraying our ancestors and relatives from the distant past as real people, with their own views of the world and their idiosyncrasies, without ending up just doing science fiction. cheap. If anyone succeeds in this endeavor, the name of the beast is Rebecca and Raj Sykes, a British archaeologist who has written the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on Neanderthals to date.

Sykes is the author of “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art” ;). The book, the casual reader may be forgiven, is very good, as it collects a huge amount of information about all aspects of the lives of those who were humanity’s closest relatives, and almost our cousins ​​(with whom we, incidentally, intermarried in the last stage of the Ice Age).

The book’s richness in detail is so great that there is sometimes a danger of getting lost in what we know about tool-making or the diet of creatures. But Sykes mitigates this partial weight of the narrative with an almost fleeting ability to create scenarios from the daily life to the inner life of the actor. neanderthal Based on the archaeological record.

In these attempts, one goal is to imagine how dealing with stone-making or the bodies of captured animals, cutting, chopping and reassembling objects, could be key to understanding how the Neanderthal mind worked. This is a very difficult view to prove empirically, but the pieces seem to fit together.

This is the audience so that the book also gets into the hands of the Brazilian audience.

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