Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

“Kindred is an extraordinary book. It really captures the zeitgeist of what is changing in our views of human evolution. We have, for the last 150 years or more, had this idea of cavemen crawling out of the dark into our modern progressive era. These are not really the opinions that anthropologists hold today. That’s not how we see the past—as brutish, nasty Hobbesian lives. Kindred is about our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals—our kissing cousins, if you will. Kindred lyrically and poetically brings out the research that shows us that this was a human species that had a very similar existence to ours and was probably capable of all sorts of creative thoughts and things like that. It really reopens, in a very beautifully written way, the idea of what the past would have looked like when there was more than one human species wandering around, what other types of ways there are to be human. That’s my primary reason for choosing it, because it’s a fantastic, incredibly well-written book.” Read more...

The best books on Anthropology

Brenna Hassett, Anthropologist