Kindred

- Blurb -

Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery over 160 years ago, they' ve metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. While 21st century scientific understanding of Neanderthals is complex and fascinating, much remains inaccessible outside the specialist literature. In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her first-hand experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share this knowledge, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals the Neanderthals as curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they were successful: survivors of over 300,000 years of massive climate change. At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we' re obsessed with what makes us special. Only one kind of human walks Earth today, but histories of our dominance and success aren' t the whole truth: many of our pioneering forebears are, in genetic terms, even more extinct than Neanderthals. Moreover, much of what' s claimed to define us was also in Neanderthals, our closest relatives, whose DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination. . . perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance. It is only by understanding them, that we can truly understand ourselves.