The subtitle is Neandrathal Life, Love, Art, and Death, and it is all of that, a scholarly recap about what we know about our ancient ancestors for the lay public. This is one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of 2021, and I am interested as while the average person has 2-3% Neandrathal genes, I have more like 4-5%, which is more than 85% of the population. So I am intrigued, let's say. The author has a life long interest in her subject, and if you are thinking how much can they really know about people who lived 100,000 years ago, the answer is surprisingly quite a lot.
The world of archeology was dominated by the colonialist need to validate white supremacy in the 19th and 20th century and was therefore misleading and wildly inaccurate when it comes to the Neandrathal. Homo sapiens’ relationship with our long-lost relatives has undergone a lot of rethinking since our relatively recent discovery of them in 1856. Until then, three years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we had no idea that they existed. Then, thanks to the Parisian anatomist Marcellin Boule, who inaccurately reconstructed a skeleton in 1909, the popular image of them has been of an ugly creature with a stooped spine and a decidedly ape-like appearance--the truth is that they are short limbed and upright and it turns out they were amazingly well adapted and resourceful. The fact that their DNA persists is evidence that they bred extensively with homo sapiens and are a not insignificant part of who we are today (me in particular).
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