Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

“People are very interested in Neanderthals, but they find it a bit intimidating because it seems so distant. Also, the majority of the scientific literature is just not accessible to most people. After writing Kindred, I have received hundreds of wonderful letters and emails. A lot of people have said that they were able to imagine themselves back in the past thanks to my work, and they didn’t expect to have that emotional connection. That was what I was hoping.” Read more...

Five Books Imagining Neanderthals

Rebecca Wragg Sykes

“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