Book: Neanderthals Rediscovered

After enjoying Svante Pääbo's book seven years ago, I'm always on the lookout for new research on Neanderthals.  This book, written in 2013, revised in 2015, and revised again in 2022, promises to be pretty current.

The color plates of Neanderthal reconstructions are pretty astonishing all by themselves.  These guys could pass on the street without causing too much commotion.

Way back when I was reading about the origin of life on Earth, and the evolution of our planet and solar system, I started a Word document listing all the dates and major events, in simple English.  Necessarily over-simplified, yes I know, but it helps me to place things along a timeline.

My timeline quit by the time mankind appeared.  None of my books really dealt with human history.

"Neanderthals Rediscovered" is allowing me to fill out that end of the spreadsheet.

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Neanderthals Built Stone Circles 175,000 Years Ago?

The book is a good overview of what's known about Neanderthals, but really I found no "new" information.

And it's a good thing I started jotting down the dates when I started, because the author throws out dates left and right without relating them to what else was happening at the time. It would have been impossible to relate the migration of sapiens into Europe with the current state of Neanderthal culture at the time, without my notes. There are many cultural traits (burial, representative art, clothing) that either arose simultaneously from both species, or were adopted by one of them from the other. But which one?

Nobody knows. In fact, that's the over-arching message of the book: we just know much from a pile of bones.

richard09 wrote:

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While I can't fault this young lady's science, her presentation on this, and the other videos of hers I checked out, really rubs me the wrong way.

1. She keeps saying "my research"... nope, you read some books.  You're not a Neanderthal researcher. And she never once credits her sources
   
2. She seems to have a pretty awe-inspiring ego
   
3. She keeps saying "This is what I believe, you can believe what you want" or "this is the way I pronounce this word." Nope.  That's a Gen-X thing, where "facts" are whatever you choose to believe they are.  Science isn't about "opinions" with everybody having equal opinions. Proofs and replicability are essential to the scientific method.  There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding Neanderthals... why not just lead with that?
   
4. She plays with her hair too much and wears shirts a couple sizes too tight.  Yeah, you got big boobs.  We see. I'm still not gonna become your patreon.
   

I concede that I too would not send any money her way.

Some of her speech issues may be from English as a second language (I believe she's Dutch, of all things). But yes, the mannerisms wear thin quite rapidly.

Homo nadeli, halfway between ape and man


I think I worked for this guy in 1986.