The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature

by Ludovic Slimak

A riveting scientific journey exploring the enigma of the Neanderthal and the species’ unique form of intelligence.

What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals?

For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in paleoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different -- and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence, very different from ours.

Slimak has travelled around the world for the past thirty years to uncover who the Neanderthals really were. A modern-day Indiana Jones, he takes us on a fascinating archaeological from the Arctic Circle to the deep Mediterranean forests, he traces the steps of these enigmatic creatures, working to decipher their real stories through every single detail they left behind.

A thought-provoking adventure story, written with wit and verve, The Naked Neanderthal shifts our understanding of deep history -- and in the process reveals just how much we have yet to learn.

Genres: Science, Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Archaeology, Natural History, Audiobook

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2022

Reviews

[Trenton Holliday · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am glad I read this book, but I have mixed feelings about it.

The Bad:

1. The book began by rubbing me the wrong way. Slimak says that one needs to do decades of work digging in Neandertal sites, in places where they once lived, before one can say anything meaningful about them. This sort of gatekeeping has no place in paleoanthropology, which at its core is a multidisciplinary endeavor. We need people studying Neandertal fossils, we need people extracting the DNA and stable isotopes from their bones, we need people studying the debris they left behind. We also need insights from primatology, other branches of zoology and ethnography. The data we have from the prehistoric past are too limited to exclude anything that might give us insight into ancient humans.

2. The idea that humans can survive in the Arctic without clothing because a guy named Wim Hoff once ran a marathon there in winter wearing only a pair of shorts induced a facepalm as I was reading it.

3. Slimak’s decades of work at Mandrin Cave is an amazing story of years of hard work paying off in the end. What frustrates me here is that he seems to ignore what I found to be the most important lesson from that site – at Mandrin Cave we have tens of thousands of years of Neandertal occupation followed by an incursion of modern humans ca. 54,000 years ago. However, the modern humans are only there ever so briefly, so the Neandertals return to the site to occupy it for another 10,000 years, after which proto-Aurignacian modern humans finally come back to the cave. To me, this shows that H. sapiens are not so technologically and cognitively superior to Neandertals that they waltz into Europe and eliminate them within a few generations. Yet in this book, Slimak only talks about how rapidly the proto-Aurignacians displaced the resident Neandertals 44,000 years ago.

4. Neandertals had few weapons based on the form of their lithic artifacts? We know they used fire-hardened or hardwood (like yew) spears that were sharpened to a point, not tipped with stone points. Such spears are not well-represented in archaeological sites because organic materials do not survive as well as stone does.

5. His main idea is that Neandertals were different from us in ways that we probably cannot imagine. This is a valid point, and one we should keep in mind when studying prehistoric people. I would argue such differences need not be hierarchical, and after reading his book, I suspect Slimak would agree with me. The problem is that when you compare Neandertal art, as Slimak does, to the scribblings of captive chimpanzees or to birds decorating their nests with colorful stones, that to me feels like a hierarchical difference.

The Good:

1. The possibility of Neandertals surviving to as recently as 28,000 years ago at the site of Byzovaya on the western flanks of Urals is absolutely fascinating. Wow.

2. His discussion of the speed with which deglaciation occurred in northern Europe at the end of the Pleistocene / early Holocene is quite frightening and unfortunately all too relevant for us today.

3. I very much enjoyed the discussion of Neandertals living in the forests of the Last Interglacial.

4. He points out that human history is not a constant march of technological progress – an easy trap for archaeologists to fall into.

5. His stories of life in the field, especially the humorous ones, add a lot to the narrative.

I hope I haven’t been too critical of a fellow paleoanthropologist and someone whose work I admire. The book is poetic in places and an easy read (it’s also a lot shorter than I anticipated). There are a few translation errors here and there – I am curious to read it in French to see how well the translator was able to capture his voice. In the end, it is much more of a philosophical treatise than it is a scientific work.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The popular imagination unfortunately made a dummy caveman out of the Neanderthal. But there’s not enough information according to this book about these Neanderthals to make the assertions scientists have made of them. And the author takes great pains to remind us that we Sapiens are very good at seeing everything about other species through our own attributes. Neanderthals were apparently great at making usable objects anew each time as though they were artisans of one off goods. Sapiens are great at both creative stuff and repetition, being able to reach a whole other level of technological achievement by repeating tasks and honing their skills.

Paleo-archaeological types have studied both us and Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Middle East and Russia for several hundred thousand years. Now somewhere in time, around the 40k years ago, Neanderthals encountered us, or we encountered them most likely in Europe somewhere maybe even in the Rhone valley where lots of humanoid remains seem to get found because it’s a good water route and habitat. But the thing is there is no evidence to say what happened. There’s no mass grave, no evidence of interaction etc. Soon after, Neanderthals died out.

But they did live on according to the artefacts left behind in places west of the Urals in Northern Russia, as far as the arctic circle. There, there was an abundance of large mammal wildlife because of a strange climate phenomenon – the great ice sheets of northern Europe were made by eastward moving Atlantic ocean moisture. Once it settled as far away as very western Russia, the weather beyond was mostly dry and not glacial. It was full of plains and forests. Mammoth and giant fauna fed the well adapted Neanderthals who lived there for a few thousand more years until their archaeological record disappeared. That was that.

I learned a few things here. One that humans are well adapted to changes in weather as long as its dry it doesn’t matter how cold we get, our metabolisms adjust to very cold weather within two weeks. Imagine that. The other thing I learned was that carbon dating can only give us a wide date of possibility, say around 1000 years of approximate time when something occurred. So you cannot say that Emperor Charlemagne had a conversation with Napoleon that colluded in the takeover of Europe in the 19thC.

The other thing I learned is that we humans use ourselves as a reference point. We keep looking for the clues that will compare Neanderthals to us. Like art and ritual and all that stuff. But it hasn’t existed in the artefacts discovered in many sites so far. And it’s hard to find evidence of peoples who largely lived outdoors and only settled in caves and shelters when needed. And then the problem is that those who came later, also dwelled in the same shelters and so on.

So, we need to think of Neanderthals as a completely different species to us and that tragically they became exist. As many species become extinct. And that is that.

[Elentarri · Rating 1 out of 5]

A pretentious, verbose, repetitive, over-wrought, poorly written, overly-philosophical, internal-monologue diatribe about... nothing. I could contribute some of this to translation issues, but not all of it. The author comes across as arrogant, insisting that only people who dig for Neanderthal remains for decades have any knowledge on the subject... but insists repeatedly that we can draw no conclusions about any of the finds. So, in short, scientists (and by default, the general public who reads what the scientist write) knows nothing about Neanderthals. Anything vaguely interesting related to Neanderthals is completely lost and subsumed in the vast forest of fluff, travelogue and more fluff. There is no overall thesis to this book, no substance, other than that Slimak thinks Neanderthals (referred to often as "the creature") is totally alien from us i.e. homo sapiens sapiens (which is a valid point), and that we don't actually know anything about them.

If you are looking for new information on Neanderthals, try: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

[Jacqui · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an intriguing take on Neanderthals. I'm glad I read it, but not sure how much to rely on. For starters, he called our early ancestors 'it'. I had trouble with that.

[Peter Tillman]

Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes' review:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
Excerpt:
"Will we ever truly understand the Neanderthals? Archaeologist Ludovic Slimak paints a vivid picture in The Naked Neanderthal. Written like a philosophical travelogue, this intriguing book offers personal vignettes of archaeological excavations and provocative critiques of researchers’ tendencies to interpret Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) as the intellectual and creative cousins of Homo sapiens. Instead, the author argues, they are stranger to us than people might admit, with a culture that is both sophisticated and alien."

[Sam Worby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite sure all the logic in this book stands up, and he does skim over the detail his own research very quickly (though summaries are available on the web). However, this is great fun - challenging and thought provoking. Very refreshing to try and glimpse, however dimly, the shadows cast by a different way of thinking and being.

[James S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author tries to convey some of the awe he feels towards this subject, but in doing so, the writing becomes rather overwrought and strained. He also obscures any new points he may be discussing in this book underneath his tiresome poetry. Final note: the author's photograph is very on brand for a researcher of Neanderthals. DNF.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our author goes to great lengths to challenge our anthropocentrism and see neanderthals as they were rather than projecting our symbolic culture onto them. To this end, he is a stickler for the science over sensationalism. We do have cannibalism in common though and their DNA lives on in European and Asian homo sapiens with 2-4% often showing up in tests.

Seemingly nearly all their artefacts are functional tools to aid their survival in harsh conditions. This isn't to say they are the grunting troglodytes of lore, they were larger and stronger than homo sapiens and had bigger brains. The author speculates that their creativity, free of ego, speaks to a possibly greater level of cognitive ability.

Homo sapiens however practiced mass production and mass conformity, making weapons that can be used at distance instead of close quarters. They were out competed and soon out populated.

Neanderthals would vanish soon after homo sapiens arrived in Europe. One of the earlier extinction events chalked up to what philosopher John Gray has termed "homo rapiens". It was ever thus.

"The more our knowledge of animal ethology progresses, the more clearly it appears that neither tools, nor thought, nor laughter, nor empathy, nor love, nor social structures fundamentally distinguish our species from the multiplicity of other living beings."

[Paleoanthro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not your normal bones, stones, and artifacts recap of Neanderthals, but rather a personnel exploration of the authors years of research and how that research has led to his interpretation of who were the Neanderthals and what we know about their culture, customs, tools, and artifacts. A remarkable and well researched account that is lively and illuminating, illustrating what it means to be Neanderthal (and human) and how our previous interpretations may not be correct.

[Carissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Naked Neanderthal" is the second book on Neanderthals I have read in the past few years (the other is "Kindred" by Rebecca Wragg-Sykes). Slimak and Wragg-Sykes have very different perspectives and obviously belong to different scientific camps. For that reason, I think reading both books is worthwhile.

Slimak has spent decades excavating Neanderthal sites. He places a premium on fieldwork and argues that you cannot begin to truly understand Neanderthals unless you have spent significant time in the field. Slimak's main argument in this book is that we have done Neanderthals a disservice by imagining them in our image. He believes that researchers are over-interpreting the available evidence to show that Neanderthals created what we would recognize as art, for example. He also is virtually certain that Neanderthals buried their dead, but thinks that we place too much emphasis on practices surrounding the dead as evidence of shared humanity, as other animals also engage in mourning rituals.

For all that, Slimak does not think that the Neanderthals were less than human, even though he thinks there was an enormous gap between our humanity and theirs. Rather, he thinks that our conception of humanity is too narrow. It is here that the enthusiasm of the specialist takes over, and in my opinion this is also the weakest part of the book. For example, he writes:

Beyond technological systems, beyond knowhow and traditions, beyond modes of acquiring protein, there is something much deeper at work than a simple cultural phenomenon: we can actually perceive another humanity. Neanderthal societies organized themselves as they went along, they 'went with the flow', showing only a passing interest in the modes of planning that are still a salient feature of our current societies.

And later:

No, the Neanderthals were not ersatz Sapiens. Not only are they different, but in many mental aspects they overshadow Sapiens - in their total, ongoing creativity, essentially free from the ego which structures so much of the differentiation of group and individual in Sapiens populations. In this sense, and comparatively, our population is very superficially creative. Indeed, it can be argued here that, in the fields of creativity, Sapiens was probably no match for Neanderthal populations and was in all likelihood intellectually inferior. But this wasn't the case for the material rationalization of the world, in which, perhaps, the Neanderthals came off second best.

Admittedly, I am a Sapiens and view the world from that perspective. However, given that Slimak spent almost the entire book telling us how little we actually know about Neanderthals (only about 40 Neanderthal bodies have ever been found, for example), I don't think he established a basis for such sweeping claims about Neanderthals "going with the flow" and having a different way of being in the world, let alone that they were intellectually superior. His argument (not reproduced here) that every Neanderthal flint is unique and balanced, as opposed to the almost industrial production of arrowheads, beads, etc., by early Sapiens is a claim that probably requires an expert eye to evaluate. Otherwise, I think pictures of Neanderthal flints and items produced by Sapiens would have been helpful in bolstering his case. Without expert training in characteristics of flints, though, the lay reader probably is not in a position to agree or disagree with him.

[Doug Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has some interesting points to make, but having made them early on he keeps going back to them over and over and over to the point that it becomes tedious. It did give me more of an idea about how little we actually know about these cousins of ours.

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought-provoking books I've read! Mr. Slimak is a wonderful author with a gift for teaching. Hoping that he writes more books! Meanwhile, I plan to read other material that he's published!

[Pip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be the first non-ficton book I've read cover to cover which reflects the beautiful descriptions and personal accounts within. However I also feel at times this style hampered the clear explanation of the archeological evidence. Overall a convincing argument for a new perspective on Neanderthals that goes beyond the world-view of modern humans.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak

https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Neandert...

In this book, paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak promises to show that Neanderthals were a distinctly different kind of humanity than homo sapiens. Slimak notes that the two species are separated by at least a half million years of divergent evolution and that it would stand to reason that they were different creatures with substantially different perspectives on reality.

Given the popular depiction of neanderthals in the modern popular media, this approach is revisionist. Neanderthals are now presented as something almost identical to sapien humanity, as if mentioning differences would be racist. Neanderthal physical differences is downplayed such that Neanderthals could pass for sapien in an urban setting. Even the Neanderthal extinction is treated almost as if the neanderthals didn’t go extinct; they just married into the sapien family.

By the end of this book, Slimak sorts this out in a tour de force, but it is slow getting there. By about 70% of the book, I was not sure that Slimak was going to offer anything but the conventional tropes.

In the first 705 of the book, we learn that that there may have been a Neanderthal community in the Siberian polar regions that lasted until 28,000 years ago, approximately 14,000 years after Neanderthals disappeared from Europe. This is interesting but not revolutionary. We also learn that Neanderthals probably were not cannibals, at least not because of environmental stress. Again, this seems to be part of the trope that Neanderthal was just like us.

But 70% of the way into the book, Slimak kicks into high gear.

First, he debunks Neanderthal art. Slimak points out that scientists have not discovered the first hole in any object that might have been used to string together shells, beads, or other adornments. We have examples of these kinds of things in sapien archeological sites, but not Neanderthal. The reports of shells with holes in them are artifacts created by crabs.

Likewise, while we can find figurines and undisputed artwork among sapien sites, we have not found anything similar at Neanderthal sites.

Similarly, much has been made about bird feathers being found at Neanderthal sites, but remains of bird feathers have been found at more primitive hominid locations. Further, it turns out that the attachment points of bird feathers have been known by Innuits to contain locations of fats that are easily sucked out for nutrition.

So, there are either no indications of Neanderthal art or not enough to matter. In comparison with Sapiens, this is a substantial difference.

More significant and surprising for me was weaponry. Neanderthal stone crafting techniques had “remarkably few weapons” in their inventory, i.e. tools that were designed solely for killing game. Slimak notes:

We can pose this hypothesis because it seems that the Neanderthals had remarkably few weapons. Take any series of tens of thousands of flint objects from any Neanderthal collection and you will find only the very occasional weapon. I would even go so far as to say that you will find them only if you really look hard for them. As objects they are consistently heavy, oddly shaped and often lacking in any technical refinement. At best, assuming they are indeed weapons, we are talking about ends of lances that would be used for stabbing rather than throwing. This has been discussed in a number of recent studies, which have come to somewhat binary conclusions. The frantic quest for Neanderthal weapons is rather like the quest for Neanderthal art: a tenuous project, as we discussed earlier.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 174). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

And:
direction. Despite a systematic search for weapons in some very well-endowed archaeological ensembles, the fact that such objects are so rare suggests that weapon production was a very marginal activity for the Neanderthals. The question of Neanderthal weapons remains little understood to this day. The picture we get is one of rudimentary technologies based on the production of massive lances or javelins that required a close contact with the game being hunted. The hunt would have been carried out using a lance and would have involved the hunters approaching their prey and taking them on at close quarters. In Mandrin as elsewhere, when we discover arms in the Neanderthal layers, they are always massive objects and would have been used as pole weapons.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (pp. 174-175). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In contrast:

When we look for sapiens arms, just a cursory glance at any collection will reveal a large number of objects that could potentially be used for hunting purposes. In Neanderthal collections, you need to dissect huge corpora of flint pieces to uncover the odd vaguely diagnostic trace of weapon use. The rarity of arms in the Neanderthal archive is striking.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 175). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

There is also the question of technique. Each Neanderthal tool is a creation in itself. Each tool is “de factor a unique object.” Slimak attributes this to the “artisanal freedom” and “very rich freedom of thought about the world” that Neanderthals enjoyed.

In contrast, Sapiens are in the grip of efficiency and routine. Sapien craftsmen would turn out scores of identical products of the same type for specific single uses, where a Neanderthal might turn out a single multi-purpose tool for multiple uses.

There is also the fact that Neanderthal technology did not change for hundreds of thousands of years. In contrast, Sapien technology was leaping forward. Sapiens were inventing projectile weapons – bows and javelins. There was a world of difference between the Neanderthal approach which involved coming into close contact with prey and running it through with physical strength versus standing off at a distance and plinking the prey with projectiles. If there was to be conflict, then the latter strategy was going to make the difference.

And it may have come down to that. Slimak shares the fascinating discovery at Mandrin cave where a Mousterian point was found in proximity to a small white blade that was the work of a modern human. By analyzing the chemical traits of soot on the walls of the cave, scientists were able to date Neanderthal occupancy of the cave to within a yar of Sapient occupancy. Slimak explains:

This high-resolution detective work produced an unexpected discovery: analysis of the films of soot revealed that the two humanities inhabited this cave no more than a year apart. A maximum of a year. That meant that, for the first time in Europe, we had evidence pointing to a physical encounter between them in a well-defined territory. The two humanities must have physically met right here. We are unable as yet to achieve a resolution greater than a year, but we have shown for the first time that the two human groups were effectively contemporaries in a very precise territory, whether their encounter took place in the wider territory, the mid Rhône valley, or in this very cave itself. As the Mandrin cave had been continually used for nearly 80,000 years by Neanderthal populations, the fact that the moment of this meeting also marks the end of Neanderthal societies everywhere in Europe can hardly be put down to an unfortunate coincidence. Not only do we find no more traces of Neanderthal cultures after the exact moment of the encounter, but it seems these populations ceased to exist, biologically speaking, outside of a few peripheral areas of the continent, which takes us back to the possible polar zones of refuge that we discussed earlier.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 161). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

So, Mandrin cave shows (a) 80,000 years of Neanderthal occupation, (b) a point of contact within a year of Sapient and Neanderthal occupancy, and (c) complete replacement of the Neandertal population by Homo Sapiens from that point on.

This is the story of Sapient/Neanderthal interaction. Wherever Homo Sapien showed up, Neanderthals disappeared, and they disappeared quickly. This is the time to consider those bow and arrows and something that looks like Westerners with a technological edge overcoming the American Indians within decades.

Again, when Sapiens made an appearance, Neanderthal disappeared from the archaeological record. So the implication is that the Neanderthals did not die a beautiful death.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 167). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

At this point, it seems that there was something substantially different between Sapiens and Neanderthals. The difference may have been genetic:

In April 2021, Nature: Molecular Psychiatry published a study that aimed to decipher the emergence of human creativity by focusing on three main aspects of personality: emotional reactivity, self-control and self-consciousness. It revealed the existence of genetic structures in Neanderthals similar to those identified in chimpanzees when it came to emotional reactivity, and a position halfway between chimpanzees and modern humans when it came to self-control and self-consciousness, which directly impacted on their creative potential, their consciousness of self and their prosocial behaviour.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 157). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In addition, that trope about not recognizing a Neanderthal in modern clothes is nonsense:

You’ve probably heard it said that you wouldn’t recognize a Neanderthal if you met one on the subway? Well, it’s not true.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 148). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

Things like eye sockets, receding forehad, occipital bun, would give the game away.

Of course, it is well-established that Neanderthal genes are found in surviving human populations. The anti-racist, “can’t we all be friends” tropes argue that this points to a beautiful homogenizing of populations.

But wait a second. While Neanderthal genes are found in human populations, human genes are not found in Neanderthal samples.

We know from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1949 on the elementary structures of kinship that the exchange of women is a fundamental, invariant feature of the organization of every human society. By way of alliance between two human groups women are systematically integrated into the group of men. Genetics suggests that this ‘patrilocality’ was already practised by Neanderthals. But this exchange of women, which ensures the biological survival of the population, is based on reciprocity: ‘I give you my sister, you give me your sister.’ Aside from ensuring the simple genetic survival of the two groups, this act creates or enables an alliance between the two peoples. The absence of signs of sapiens interbreeding in the last Neanderthals and, conversely, their widespread presence among the first Sapiens in Europe could then represent a fundamental indicator as to the nature of the relationships between these populations, whether they took place in Europe or in Asia.

Palaeogenetics, then, reveals an unexpected non-reciprocity which might be summed up as follows: ‘I take your sister but I don’t give you mine.’ This lack of reciprocity in one of the fundamental structures of the relations between populations is disturbing. In ethnography the exchange of genes is not about love but is rather foundational and characteristic of the structure of alliances between human societies.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 165). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In addition, the Neanderthal genes come from a period much earlier than the end:

Genetics in fact has told us nothing about the fate of the last Neanderthals, since the small percentages that survive in current populations seem to derive from much earlier interbreeding, perhaps around the 100th millennium, somewhere in Asia.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 163). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

At this point, Slimak has met his claim. Neanderthals were alien to human beings. They didn’t change their tools. They didn’t produce weapons. They didn’t innovate. They didn’t create forms. They didn’t create art. Perhaps their tools were their art, with each one being a unique creation, but whatever they were they were not going to hold their own against Sapiens and the ability to turn out efficient weapon forms using the most modern technology.

[ConfusedMagpie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work presents a take on Neanderthals that can only be described as illuminating and ground-breaking. It truly opened my mind and inspired me. An amazing re-imagining of the subject, and also very enjoyably written.

[T.O. Munro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time is a funny thing, not just the time it took me to devour this densely written but intriguing book, but the timespans of history and pre-history.

I remember once an analogy that compressed the 4,600,000,000 years of the Earth's existence into the lifetime of a 46 year old middle-aged human. then one year of our human equates to 100 million years of the Earth. It makes for a fascinating frittering of time on a spreadsheet and I shall put my findings at the bottom of this review.

However, the point to be made is how inconceivably small the span of modern human existence has been compared to the 300,000 year successful survival of the Neanderthals (still less the 180 million year rule of the dinosaurs.)

There are no full Neanderthal skeletons. They are known through only a few bones of their own, the bones of the animals they hunted and fed on. The vast majority of evidence about them is from the stone tools they made and used along with some slightly dubious/hopeful/appropriatorial inferences drawn about cave art and jewellery.

This excellent tome appears to have lost none of its erudite precision in translation. Slimak as a foremost expert in this enigmatic species (a very near relative of ours) describes the fraught process of extracting and validating the archaeological evidence and tests a variety of theories about the Neanderthals. His argument urges caution against hypothesis that insist on seeing the Neanderthal distorted by the human-tinted lens of our human mindset and expectations.

Did they mourn their dead? Maybe - but so do many animals, including chimpanzees?
Do these shells with holes signify jewellery, a necklace perhaps? - the holes occurred naturally, they were not bored by any tool.
is this Neanderthal cave art? Modern humans will have used the caves as well, can you be sure of the dating of that art?

In challenging these hypotheses, Slimak is not trying to make the Neanderthal more primitive, or more significantly 'less than human' but to emphasise how the creature was differently human, that they had a different way of being and - more relevant perhaps to contemporary experiences - a different way of interacting with nature. They were not stupid, their brain cases are larger than the average modern humans' but that does not mean they had to act or think like we do.

Slimak is quick to emphasise that Neanderthals are not human like us - genetically chimpanzees are perhaps 10 times further removed from us than Neanderthals, making the latter close to us, but not like us. (In my mind, the difference between Chimpanzee and Neanderthal's relationship to is is like that between the 4th generation 'relatives' that the website 23andMe keeps on claiming to have found (with a less than 1% share of my DNA) and my half-brother.)

Slimak's expertise in the field bleeds through in every line as well as his caution about the dating of evidence based on past cavalier excavations that paid too little attention to the archaeological layers, or carbon dating whose multi-millennia wide uncertainties at this historic range make it hazardous to deduce any firm conclusions about the temporal or locational contemporality of Neanderthals with modern humans. It is remarkable in the midst of all that tenatativity to have Slimak assert that a flame test looking at the soot on cave walls has given unequivocal evidence that - in this particular site - Neanderthal and modern human occupation of the cave was separated by a single year some 60,000 years ago. I would have liked to hear more about the nature of this soot and flame test to understand how such precision could be deduced. However, Slimak is less interested in sharing that science, rather than how that science illuminates the relationship between Neanderthal and modern human.

His conclusion is that the arrival of modern-humans in Europe was the trigger for the swift collapse in the Neanderthal population - apart from a few isolated communities within the Russian steppes that survived until about 28,000 years ago.

The process of that extinction is less certain, was it outright warfare, was it more successful competition for resources, was it the bringing of diseases. Unsurprisingly, Slimak draws parallels with the various extinctions perpetuated within the species of modern humans - mainly by European colonists (aka invaders). The ancient civilisations of America, North, south and central were wiped out by the importing of disease (small pox), the exercise of superior weapons technology (the rifle), and the destruction of resources (wiping out of the buffalo herds on which the tribes of the American plains depended).

While at this distance one can draw no conclusions about modern humans bringing new diseases to Europe, the stone-craft record offers telling evidence on the weapons technology available to the two species. It is incredible how much can be deduced from fragments of napped stone, and how easily the experts can distinguish between stone crafted by modern-humans and Neanderthals.

Neanderthals had far fewer weapons, those that did were large close quarter instruments, they hunted game hand-to-hand/claw, and their craftwork was more individualised - elegant even - such that no two pieces were exactly alike; in each case the Neanderthal napper brought something different from the stone.

Modern man had a much higher abundance of weapons, arrow heads, spear/javelin points suggesting a capacity to hunt/kill at speed and at range. A difference in technology akin to the rifle vs bow and arrow. Also modern human stone napping was systemised, almost industrialised, leading to a conformity of pieces - where form was sacrificed to uniformity of function.

These differences in technology would have helped modern humans to sustains themselves in larger groups through more efficient hunting that might exhaust a region's food supply. The Neanderthals in smaller groups, coexisting with - rather than depleting - their local natural resources would have been easily outcompeted by the modern humans, whether or not the two species actually came to blows in open warfare.

I find a contemporary relevance to all this in the nature of humans to develop exploitative technologies that invade regions and extract resources, while cowing indigenous people who are living more or less in equilibrium with their ecosystems. The Neanderthals were not stupid but had found a way of being with nature (as inferred from their stone workings) that was symbiotic rather than parasitic. The tide of human history has been to reject such symbioses, to see ourselves as masters of nature rather than part of it and to pursue growth/development rather than equilibrium/wellbeing.

As that avariciousness reaches its pinnacle in the capitalism fuelled climate crisis, maybe it is time to take a lesson from our extinct Neanderthal cousins, and learn how to live in harmony with nature on a planet whose resources are finite.




If the world's history was shrunk to the timeline of a 46 year old middle aged human then
25 years ago, photosynthesising plants began to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and release oxygen
5 years ago the activities of oceanic plankton created a breathable oxygenated atmosphere
3 years ago the supercontinent of Pangea formed
2.5 years ago, the dinosaur domination of the world began
2 years ago, Pangea broke up
1.5 years ago, Africa and South America separated

8.5 months ago the continent of Antarctica reached the South Pole
8 months ago the Dinosaurs were wiped out in a mass extinction
7 months ago India collided with Asia to form the Himalayas (ongoing)
6.5 months ago the first primates appeared

16 days ago the lines of humans and chimpanzees separated at their earliest common ancestor
11 days ago* the isthmus of panama closed disrupting ocean currents and shifting the Earth into a colder paradigm
9 days ago the cycle of long ice ages interspersed with brief warm periods began

37 hours ago the First Neanderthals appeared
35 hours ago the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals lived
4 hours ago modern humans entered Europe
3.5 hours ago Neanderthals went extinct
1 hour ago the last ice age ended facilitating a shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian culture

1 minute ago - the industrial revolution began

19 seconds ago - I was born

(* recent studies suggest the isthmus of panama closed earlier than we had thought just over 2.5 months ago (23 million years) ago rather than the previously thought 11 days ago (3 million years))

[George Sr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has presented a somewhat incoherent thesis. He begins by telling us how unremarkable we are and how we are so much like the non-human species who inhabit our planet. He ends by telling us how unlike modern humans the Neanderthals were. We’re almost indistinguishable from non-human species but radically different from our closest relatives? As the robot on “Lost in Space” would say, “It does not compute.” I think he overdid it on both ends of the spectrum. It seems fairly obvious to me that we are radically different from crows and wolves and very similar to Neanderthals.

The author seems to be trying to counteract the prevailing opinion that Neanderthals are just ugly Homo Sapiens. Of course they’re not. They lived for several hundred thousand years and never developed missile weapons. When you’re hunting mammoths and polar bears, the preferred method is to stand as far away as possible and kill them with missile weapons. It is somewhat dangerous to walk up to one of these animals and stab it with a crudely made lance, but that’s what Neanderthals did. This one fact alone is evidence of an enormous gulf between Neanderthals and early modern humans.

Another bone I have to pick with the author is the inordinate amount of time he spends telling us about his adventures digging holes and looking for fossils. I got impatient reading about the author and not about Neanderthals. He should have written two books, one about his adventures and one about Neanderthals.

Despite the flaws in his presentation, the author does share a lot of good information about our closest cousins.

[Steven T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is essentially a long article that was made into a book with a bunch of filler and off topic digressions about his travel experiences and fieldwork. These digressions were the most interesting part of the book.

The substantive argument of the book amounts to this: most of what people think they know about Neanderthals, including some experts, is suspect. There simply isn’t enough concrete evidence to make definite conclusions. For example, Neanderthal art. Did Neanderthals even have a concept of art comparable to Homo sapiens? Expert opinions differ.

Nonetheless Slimak doesn’t hesitate to assert in the conclusion that Neanderthal art was superior to Homo sapiens art because it’s not egocentric. Wtf?

[John Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ludovic Slimak is a Neanderthal researcher of long standing, but despite his scientific credentials, he is anything but sober and cautious. For the great majority of the book, his primary goal seems to be to buttonhole the reader and shout in his ear: “The Neanderthals are different than you and me!” A rather obvious message, you’d think; but he goes further. He swoons over the perception of a Russian researcher who tells him confidently: “Ludovic, they have no soul.” (“I will never be able to thank this researcher enough for saying those words,” sighs the author.) He calls the Neanderthal “A creature a bit like the creature of Frankenstein…unfathomable, since it is hidden in the shadows of the dead, without thoughts, without any words of his own.” This is the Neanderthal to Slimak: a thing, a thing that is in some way conscious, but without a soul. Or so he gives the impression.

In this he’s reminiscient of Descartes, who claimed that animals, being brutes, had no real capacity to suffer, and so enabled hundreds of years of grotesque experimentation on dogs, cats, and apes. At the time that I was born, it was a truism that what separated human beings from the animals was our ability to make tools. After Jane Goodall proved that chimps could make tools (as we’ve since learned that other mammals and birds can also do), the distinguishing feature of human personhood was our use of language. Washoe the chimp, Koko the gorilla, and Alex the African grey parrot are human by that standard. Still, humans keep reaching to find essential differences between us and animals, and they keep failing. Ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. The transmission of culture, defined as localized, learned knowledge, down generations in a family or tribe. All have since been identified in animals. It’s becoming clear that just as there is no single “missing link” between ancestral apes and modern humans, there is no dividing point between the state of being an animal and the state of being a person. There are only continuums.

To be fair, Slimak makes exactly this point at the beginning of chapter four. But Slimak continues his quest to hammer home that the Neanderthals are so different from us as to be essentially different (which is a faith-based claim, since there is no accepted, scientifically measurable distinction between the human and the nonhuman). We see that the Neanderthals honored their dead. So? Chimps grieve, too! Neanderthals adorned themselves. So do birds in New Guinea! It’s all more of an argument for respecting non-human minds than it is for dehumanizing Neanderthals, and it’s unfortunate that he spends so much effort on it, because very near the end of the book, Slimak suddenly softens and makes the point that I would have preferred that he start with.

Put shortly, as a dig archeologist, Slimak believes that there is a dramatic difference in Sapiens tools and Neanderthal tools, and that it has little to do with their quality as tools. “Observation of sapiens technological systems reveals systematic modes of planning and standardization….If we look at a hundred flints…we know the next 100,000 will be exactly the same. We understand instinctively what the maker was trying to do, which is never the case with Neanderthal artifacts….No two [Neanderthal] tools are alike, and that is remarkable. There is no doubt that particular skills were passed on. But this was a culture without normalization, without standardization, without systematic repetition, without that quasi-industrial character....Each Neanderthal tool is a creation in itself. It plays with the natural forms of the material, with the texture of the rock, with its colors, with its touch. There is a balance, an absolute perfection to the object which reveals a remarkable way of seeing the world.” Slimak sees this as “an infinite creativity beyond compare”; a “creativity that is beyond us.” To him, this suggests a fundamentally different, and very non-sapiens, way of looking at and being in the world.

Now, one of the issues I have with Slimak is that he never seems to have an opinion that he doesn’t carry to an extreme. Having praised the superb creativity of the Neanderthal artisan, he has to disparage that of our own: “The artisanal and artistic creations of sapiens are beautiful, but they are beautiful and nothing more...They rarely go any further. For sapiens, art is just an expression and affirmation of ego.” (Tell that to the hundreds of anonymous craftspeople who brought beauty to details that would never be seen, being too high on the spires of European cathedrals to be visible to the ordinary eye!) Still, I think he’s on to something when he says that “in the fields of creativity, sapiens was probably no match…and was in all likelihood intellectually inferior.” Again: badly expressed. Intellect and creativity are like qualities and creativity cannot be measured by intellect. But when I look at the shape of the Neanderthal skull, and I think about what it might mean to have a brain that was, on average, larger than ours but shaped very differently, I imagine a human being who was wise in ways no member of my own species is wise. I can only speculate on how. We will probably never know. And I think this is the essential difference, the mystery, that Slimak is awkwardly trying to preserve.

[Leonardo Quiroga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy buen libro, que explora la concepción del mundo desde otras intelligencias distintas a la nuestra, ayudando a entender cómo podría ser una inteligencia extraterrestre. El autor es un antropologo francés especialista en Neanderthales.

[Antonis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beaucoup de détails insignifiants et très peu de substance. Bavard, répétitif, baroque pour dire très peu de chose. Je n'ai pas pu lire plus d'une cinquantaine de pages

[Belinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book interesting, but there were things about it that I didn't respond well to. My guess is that the author is a typical scientist and he thinks he's very clever and holds a place above the rest of us. Weirdly enough he argues against ego in the final chapters, but hey ho, he definitely has one.

I will summarise with what I liked and didn't like. I am no archaeologist so obviously the first point would be:
1) No one can possibly understand the Neanderthal unless the spend 30 years digging in caves once occupied by them. True, this gives the author a massive head start, but it doesn't grant you the crown. Everyone has expertise and even amateurs may have a new perspective.

2) He uses a lot of big words. Now I love words, but I do think back to the time when someone high up at my workplace told me that people don't need to use big words to make a point, simplicity works just as well and is often more accessible/friendly. To write a popular scientific book that is intended to draw in anyone interested in Neanderthals and litter the book with language that is pedantic and difficult is just showing off.

3) At the start of the book Slimak quotes a scientist who says Neanderthal's didn't have souls. I disliked the obvious arrogance of this. How the hell would he know? I think living things have souls/a life essence and to compare Neanderthals with sapiens by using criterion like art or inventions or innovative ways when cooking a potato doesn't make them soulless. Perhaps Slimak was trying to prove this point by comparing indigenous peoples way of life with the "go with the flow" of Neanderthals (Slimak's quote, not mine). The Maori in my country are known for a holistic viewpoint (not necessarily "going with the flow") traditional ways, respectful relationships with the environment, a very strong sense of community, and such an attachment to the land that their whakapapa is spoken at the beginning of anything formal.

Maori also have art, built homes and created weapons and tools. Neanderthals created tools so individual that not one is the same. However, NO ART, no new ways with technologies (read weapons and tools like needles) have been discovered or have survived. Possibly they carved? Maori do, which means their pieces would have rotted or worn down even in a Siberian landscape. Possibly they were people of the tools - practical, painting their bodies and not cave walls, etc. Who knows? Not I. Not Slimak.

When Homo naledi were discovered in a cave used for burials the archaeologists also discovered lines on the walls, a small blade in a child's hand, obvious effort made by the tribe to make sure they buried their dead in a place where predators wouldn't find the bones. I believe naledi had smaller brains than Neanderthals so this obvious effort at respecting their dead and marking the cave with lines couldn't be exclusive to sapiens and naledi? Surely being part of Homo means there's abilities that are unique to that group?

Slimak also mentioned burial doth not maketh the soulful Homo, but if there's real ritual around it, which naledi had, then there's something else going on. There's connection, empathy, memories, love or respect for the individual. Interestingly, Slimak didn't mention the aged and disabled Neanderthal skeletons found that would have required care by others to heal and to cope with limited physical abilites.

Anyway, this book can only dig so deep, despite the 30 years of real time digging, because the evidence is not weighty in the way it is with sapiens.

I did like that the author mentioned that the neanderthal people may have been a very different sort of species with a very different way of living. We do see that in non-contact sapiens already. They may be less violent, more matriarchal, less hierarchical, etc. They may, in many ways, been more evolved in the way they lived their lives due to a lack of ego. Sapiens are violent, territorial arseholes after all, but this book didn't delve into differences like these, merely into the inability of archaeologists to find tangible proof of art and the evolution of tools from just stone to metals etc. Apparently that's the only way to prove that a species is smart?

A decent book to read and one that made me think about the limitations around archaeology more than it made me think less of an extinct species.

[Monica Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a non-scientist fascinated by human evolution and Neanderthals, I found Ludovic Slimak's narrative to be compelling, provocative, and utterly believable. The book takes readers on a journey through Slimak's career as a Neanderthal fossil hunter, from deep underground in European caves to the Siberian Arctic Circle, retracing Neanderthal footsteps in a quest for fossils and stone tools that were once sculpted by a different kind of human eons ago. All along Slimak seeks to disabuse readers of preconceived ideas about Neanderthals and uncover the real, "naked Neanderthal,” as close as we can get to understanding him (or her). Sometimes the pace of the book is a little slow, but it all builds to fascinating and often devastating conclusions, which Slimak backs up with both evidence and logic. The more I read and reread this book, the harder I find it to disagree with its conclusions.

What I admire most about Slimak is that he’s unafraid to speak openly about the elephant in the room: the fact that Neanderthals, who have roamed the continents for hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth at the EXACT time when modern humans came along. Detectives don’t believe in such coincidences, and neither should scientists. Slimak's take: we did it. The extinction of the Neanderthals is humanity’s first and most devastating genocide.

Homo Sapiens had superior weapon technology and used it to kill another species of human beings into extinction. We can beat around the bush all we want, but the evidence stares us in the face. One by one, Slimak tears down all attempts at denying our culpability as a species by blaming the extinction of Neanderthals on everything from viruses to climate change to assimilation into our species. None of these theories hold water. Neanderthals are gone forever, Slimak says, and it is we, Homo Sapiens, who are responsible for their extinction.

The other major thread throughout the book is that we do Neanderthals a great injustice by constantly comparing them to us and fashioning them in our own image, as if the only way to be human is to be as much as possible like us. Slimak wants to free the Neanderthals from that narrow perspective and allow them to be viewed as a different kind of human, extraordinary in their own right. He describes our sister species as intelligent human beings who were wonderfully creative in ways we cannot fathom. Slimak makes a distinction between our two cultures and ways of being. Ours, he says, is based on systematic standardization of technology, of weapons, of culture. Group think, if you will. Neanderthal’s way of being human appears to be the exact opposite. Each tool made by a Neanderthal is a unique work of art, evidence of a freedom of thought beyond our comprehension. The Neanderthals, he writes, “are not ersatz Sapiens.” It makes no sense to pretend they’re just another, lesser form of “us,” considering we evolved separately for nearly half a million years. How can we expect to have evolved the exact same brain over the course of such time spans? Their minds were different, but not less than ours. It is in light of this new appreciation of Neanderthals that their extinction, or eradication, seems especially and devastatingly tragic.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more, but couldn't. Call it a 2.5 rounded up, or even a 2.25 rounded up more.

Scratch that, per an add-on of the last 5-6 brief paragraphs. It's 2 stars.

Here are the main problems:
1. No index; that always gets a ding
2. Not a lot of "there" there; I'll get to what "Neanderthal whisperer" Slimak has as a "there" in a minute, but what it is could have been in a 30-page Academia paper.
3. Shades heavily from anthropology to sociology — note that Levi-Strauss is far and away the top listing in the bibliography. (I assume the influence is to a fair degree from structural anthropology. That said, just as Noam Chomsky is largely wrong about "deep structures" in grammar, Levi-Strauss is likely largely wrong about such structures in cultures.
4. The "there" is sometimes self-contradictory or hidden by fluff. Or romanticism. And, there's hypocrisy in that Slimak presents himself as postulating an anti-romantic view of Neanderthals.

As for what that "there" is? Neanderthals ain't H. sapiens or a kindly incorporated H. sapiens. They need to be viewed as a separate species, he says. On the bottom line portion of that, he says that genetic analysis says most interbreeding took place 40-50,000 years before the Neanderthal disappearance. H. sapiens at the end basically conquered them far more than merging with them.

He also says no instances of Neanderthal creativity exist. Alleged jewelry-making? Easily disproven. Alleged cave art? Dating provenance not certain in some cases; where certain on date and creator, not really art.

I would largely agree with this message, but then, after claiming we can't know a lot about Neanderthals, he makes various pronouncements, most riddled with romanticism. Levi-Strauss probably is a factor in that.

That said, I can't shove it down to 2 stars, let alone 1. The message, contra other recent books on Neanderthals, is a needed one, when not muddied over. Unfortunately, per the following paragraphs, and what he has in the pipeline, I can't overlook the problems that much, as he apparently is going to continue them.

Slimak apparently is going to double down on the romanticism in his next book though, whose title and subhed claim that Neanderthals have things to say about human dying.

By his words in this book, tosh.

Tosh also on presenting humans as "the last Neanderthal," which IS the title of his in-progress next book.

And with that, I just moved this one down to two stars.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paleogenetics shows, undisputedly, the presence of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA in us Sapiens and that gene flows between different Sapien populations of the Pleistocene Epoch appear to have been systematic.

However, surprisingly, the opposite is not true, and the genetic sequencing of the most recent Neanderthal populations (usually from proteins present in their teeth) in Europe shows the absence of any Sapien genetic markers into aboriginal Neanderthal populations.

The implications from this odd paleogenetic pattern for providing insight into relations between Neanderthals and Sapiens including their historical and ethnographical interactions appears to be crucial.

Author Ludovic Slimak offers possible explanations for this paleogenetic dichotomy. What are you ideas for the cause of this one-way flow of DNA?

Additional evidence to be aware is that very few lithic weapons have been found among often abundant, well-made Neanderthal tools at archeological sites. This is in contrast to the abundance of lithic weapons usually found at paleolithic Sapien archeological sites.

Were Sapiens responsible for the extinction of an entire humanity? Interaction outcomes between Europeans and Indians of the Americas was a distant echo of the Sapien / Neanderthal interactions?

Human activities powered by our language based abstract thinking increasingly affect the whole biosphere system of Earth, driving an ongoing global mass extinction and massive environmental changes. Would the theoretical, continued presence of Neanderthals be an influence and mitigate our global impact to our biosphere?

This book is rich with new information and new understandings of Neanderthals with which we definitely met face to face in Europe 40,000 to 43,000 years ago and probably, also in Siberia about 30,000 years ago.

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the unabridged 6-hour audio version of this title (read by John Sackville, Tantor Audio, 2024).

Neanderthals were a very advanced branch of the hominin family bush, the braided stream that makes up our ancestry. They had thrusting weapons for close combat as well as throwing weapons. We have evidence of advanced burial practices, such as multiple bodies buried together. Given these facts, the prevailing notion that Neanderthals were dumb, to the extent of using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult, is puzzling.

Sharing insights from his archaeological investigations, that took him from the Arctic Circle to Mediterranean forests, Slimak, whose views are at odds with much of published archaeological research, tries to set the record straight about recent assertions that Neanderthals were our intelligent cousins, who could be visualized as wearing suits and ties, had they survived until today. They went extinct shortly after modern humans began to populate Europe, raising the possibility of a genocide event.

After emerging from Africa, modern humans moved to northern Europe fairly quickly, reaching there about 50,000 years ago. Neanderthals had resided in that area for 500,000 years and there is genetic evidence of them interbreeding with the arriving modern humans. All non-African modern humans have traces of Neanderthal DNA in them. The theory of the two human species interacting and interbreeding in southern Europe many millennia later is, however, disputed.

Neanderthals, and their interbreeding with modern humans, constitute an important turning point in our evolutionary history, which merits detailed study and deep understanding. The word "Naked" in the title refers to a model of the creature, of its physical appearance and soul, obtained from direct examination of archaeological evidence, unspoiled by preconceptions and prejudices.

[Mary A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is much more than a study of Neanderthals; it is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human. Ludovic Slimak combines archaeology with broader questions about intelligence, symbolism, and identity, encouraging readers to reconsider common assumptions.
One of the book’s strengths is the author’s engaging accounts of his 30 years excavating Neanderthal sites, particularly at Mandrin Cave and Byzovaya. His descriptions make the research process interesting and accessible. A key theme is the role of symbolic thought as a marker of humanity, and Slimak questions whether Neanderthals truly displayed it. He is skeptical about evidence for Neanderthal art and body adornment, raising important points about how we interpret archaeological findings.
Neanderthals, who lived for around 500,000 years and were thought to have disappeared 42,000 years ago, may have survived as recently as 28,000 years ago at Byzovaya. Amazing!
Slimak also discusses how Neanderthals approached technology differently from Homo sapiens, crafting each tool individually rather than using mass production techniques.
One of the more debated arguments in the book is that Homo sapiens were primarily responsible for Neanderthal extinction. While I am not entirely convinced, Slimak presents an interesting case.
This book will appeal not only to those interested in ancient species but also to readers who enjoy considering new perspectives on human history and identity.

[Erik Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly enjoyable polemic. The central point, that we tend to see neanderthals through human eyes, is quite a strong one. I've shared the fascination with the "discoveries" that they had aesthetic sensitivities and practices, often partly because this elevates them above the condescending knuckle-dragger level to which they are often consigned, but it is an interesting notion that simply because they didn't have those facets does not mean they were not intelligent or creative. The author makes an interesting case for this. However, he then slips in a very bold assertion that modern humans must have been responsible for their demise, based simply on the belief that an encounter between the two groups occurred. This seemed to be a bigger leap for me, a lot rested on the dating of soot in a cave. I felt that the author began to become guilty of what he accused others of: generalisations based on projections of our self-perceptions. You can't on the one hand extoll the virtues of a species that has survived so long, being clearly so adaptable and resilient, and then assume that over those 300,000 years there was no variation or evolution in their behaviours. I began to resent the failure to substantiate claims and what I initially liked about the author - that he was unwilling to draw conclusions about his subject, despite having been so involved in gathering evidence about it - fell away into lots of unnecessary speculation.

[J.R.G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Durante los últimos quinientos años-practicamente desde el inicio de la era de las exploraciones y el inicio de la colonizacion de esos territorios recien descubiertos-los europeos hemos tenido problemas con la concepción del otro, de la alteridad. ¿Quienes eran esas personas que íbamos encontrando a través de los nuevos territorios que íbamos encontrando e integrando en nuestras metrópolis?, ¿Como relacionarnos con ellos?, ¿Como integrarlos?. Preguntas difíciles de responder, yo diría que la repuesta o las respuestas han sido desde el simple racismo y colonialismo y la mera destrucción de esas otras alteridades al paternalismo que cristalizaria en el mito del buen salvaje, sin aceptar otras soluciones que pasarian por aceptar al otro tal como es, sin apriorismos, sin prejuicios.
De esto es de lo que habla este libro sobre los neandertales, esa otra humanidad de la que últimamente se han publicado númerosos artículos, muchos de los cuales han tratado de "sapientalizarlos" , de "domesticarlos" en una actitud bastante parecida a la que tenía el colonizador por el colonizado.
Por último, yo solo le pondría algún "pero" en algunas opiniones que vierte sobre el descubrimiento y la conquista de América, sin duda es un libro que va a contracorriente siendo estimulante para aquel lector que no quiere adocenarse y piense en poner a prueba sus propias opiniones sobre el asunto.

[Rama Rao · Rating 1 out of 5]

An exploration of our closest human relative

The author presents a different perspective on neanderthal culture and society in this book. He emphasizes the importance of understanding neanderthals on their own terms, rather than solely through comparisons with modern humans. According to him, by analyzing the neanderthal into another human-like species is racism and based on prejudicial assumptions.

Palaeobiological and archeological evidence show that both neanderthals and modern humans produced similar tools and ornaments, suggesting some cultural exchanges and parallel development of technologies. Recent research reveals that neanderthals and modern humans coexisted for extended periods, engaging in interbreeding and cultural interactions that shaped the evolutionary trajectories of these two species. Interbreeding between neanderthals and modern humans occurred between 60,000 to 40,000 years ago in Europe and Asia. This gene flow affected the genomes and biology of both species, with modern non-African human populations carrying about 2% neanderthal DNA. The author’s suggestion that scientific analysis focuses on subjective realities rather than a more objective perspective. His observations are far-fetched and unrealistic.