![]() ![]() Accumulated from the approximately 200 known Neanderthal sites, the information that Sykes evocatively and enthusiastically presents enables readers to appreciate Neanderthals as sentient creatures, and possibly imagine themselves sharing, Jean Auel–like, a Pleistocene encounter with them. ![]() ![]() ![]() Possible burial practices indicate their reactions to death. Sykes explains that the bones show that Neanderthals were shorter, heavier, and more muscular than modern humans, while their tools reflect a nomadic hunting culture. They left a legacy of bones, stone tools, wood tools, hearths, and other artifacts that testify to their bestriding Europe and Asia for a prior 350 millennia. Sykes cites the discovery that the human genome contains 1.8 to 2.6 percent of Neanderthal DNA, showing that there was interhuman breeding before the Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago. A paleoanthropologist who has studied Homo neanderthalensis, Sykes summarizes current knowledge of this extinct human species, which has been recognized to be ancestral to Homo sapiens since the 1856 discovery in Germany’s Neander Valley of an anatomically unusual skull. Neanderthals’ lives have been revealed through ever-improving archaeological technologies that provided data that challenge conceptions of Neanderthals as evolutionary failures and portray them, instead, as successful adapters to their environments and cognitive, emotional beings to whom we can feel akin. ![]()
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