Look through shadows, listen beyond echoes; they have much to tell. Not only of other ways to be human, but new eyes to see ourselves. The most glorious thing about the Neanderthals is that they belong to all of us, and they're no dead-end, past-tense phenomenon. They are right here. In my hands typing and your brain understanding my words. Read on, and meet your kindred.
According to her own website, Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist, writer and “creative professional”, with an especial interest in the ancient world of the Palaeolithic, and whose doctoral thesis was the first synthesis of evidence for late Neanderthals in Britain. With such impressive credentials, stated interests in creative writing and the highlighting of women in earth sciences, it's not a surprise that I found Kindred to be such an impressive read; Wragg Sykes not only relates the entire history of Neanderthal research, but in engaging prose, she explains why the story of these hominid cousins should matter to us humans today. I loved all of this, beginning to end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Amid ancient surfaces densely spangled by myriad artefacts, fireplaces are like archaeological wormholes, bridging the impossible chasms of time separating us from long-vanished dwellers. As researchers encircle hearths, excavating, their presence is like an afterglow of human attention, reanimating empty spaces. Time collapses, and it's almost as if our fingers reaching out might graze the warmth of Neaderthal skin, sitting right there beside us.Wragg Sykes shares how evolving scientific techniques have enabled archaeologists to learn an incredible amount about Neanderthal customs and culture, and while my eyes sometimes glazed over with all of the information about flakes and discoids and bifaces, knapped here and carried there – astounding toolmaking evidence that nonetheless became a bit repetitive to this lay reader – I was truly blown away by the microscopic and atomic research that can not only show where, say from a single tooth, a Neanderthal child was born and moved throughout her days, but through the examination of minuscule growth patterns, which were seasons of want or plenty in that shortened life. It all made me think about how much information has been lost over the years because of archaeologists excavating sites before they had the technology to properly preserve the integrity of those sites (which then made me wonder what mistakes future scientists will accuse our generation of making), but I was fascinated by the idea that currently, sites are 3D-mapped by lasers before digging begins and archaeologists have been able to retrieve millions of Neanderthal artefacts from the “rubbish heaps” left behind by those Victorian Age pioneers who sought only bone and obvious tools.
While minds create things, things also create minds in a manner that extends far beyond the individual or even the generation, and can transform whole species. For Neanderthals, new experience or encounters opened up fresh ways of thinking about the world. It's not a stretch to suggest that their technological innovations probably impacted other aspects of their lives. Composite tools are a case in point; the inherent process of joining together must have reinforced concepts of connectedness and collaboration, crucial for hunting and social networks. And since composite tools are made up of materials connecting different places and times, these objects had a unique capacity to act as potent mnemonics, expanding the vistas of memory and imagination.I also appreciate how Wragg Sykes attempts to revive the Neanderthal mind – with a culture and anatomy much like those of early Homo sapiens (including a brain slightly larger, if differently shaped, than ours), these were no knuckle-dragging brutes; there is evidence that they made art, ornaments, shared their food communally, and participated in funerary practises. There is also no doubt that Neanderthals and early humans interbred (all people except those of Sub-Saharan lineage have Neanderthal DNA) and Wragg Sykes writes that's there's no reason to believe these weren't the couplings of fellow humans who recognised each other as related beings.
By 20,000 years ago, we were alone on the surface of this planet. Nonetheless, the Neanderthals still lived, after a fashion. Even as our encounters fell out of all memory, our blood and our babies still contain the fruits of interactions with the universe's other experiments in being human. Bones and stones long waited underground for us to rediscover our shared future. And when we finally did, everything changed.Wragg Sykes makes a compelling case for embracing Neanderthals into the human family – not only because “othering” has led to the worst of the ways we humans have treated each other throughout history, but because of some disturbing experiments being done today with Neanderthal DNA: putting the DNA into frogs to try and discover Neanderthals' pain response; putting the DNA into humanoid robots; there's no reason to believe these aren't the first steps on the road to Unfrozen Caveman Lawyers, and is all of this in keeping with the dignity and respect that we purport to reserve for our fellow humans?
From the Victorian spelunkers whose discoveries shook their cosy worldviews to the precision data revealed in modern laboratories, the history of Neanderthal research is a fascinating one; and with evocative and empathetic storytelling, Wragg Sykes reanimates these long-forgotten ancestors. Kindred is an engrossing story, told well.
As a modern, feminist writer, some of Wragg Sykes' ideas challenged me in their wokeness (and by "challenged" I don't mean I vehemently disagree, I just need to think further; she is certainly the expert and I the old-fashioned thinker). A couple of examples:
In describing wear patterns on teeth and varying musculature between samples that lead to proposed gender identification, it's pretty much agreed that male Neanderthals spent most of their time knapping lithics (pounding stones) and women prepared hides (with the wear on their teeth suggesting that they would clamp hides in their mouths to free up their hands to work them.) Wragg Sykes warns against thinking of these gender roles as definitive:
We have little idea how they defined their own categories of gender, which goes beyond the spectrum of biological sex variation. Their social distinctions need not have been binary or mapped directly onto anatomy.Even acknowledging the presence of Two Spirit individuals in some North American indigenous communities or the hijra in India, the idea of nonbinary people seems like such a newly accepted idea that inferring them backwards to a prehistoric non-Homo sapiens group seems more like political correctness than good scientific reckoning. Without nuanced and enlightened thinking about the self (which apparently even we can only trace back a couple of hundred years), I can't imagine Neanderthals bucking accepted gender roles based on external sex indicators (not that they may not have been confused by a sense of internal mismatching). As I don't think that Wragg Sykes could possibly provide evidence to show that Neanderthals didn't link anatomy to gender, this seems a passage included for the sake of being progressive - which plays mischief with the science. "This tooth shows hide-working wear so we'll say it's from a female." "Wait a minute, it may have been an anatomical male who preferred to present as a female, thereby assuming female duties." How can science proceed meaningfully along those indefinite lines of thinking?
In writing about conjectured encounters that might have led to interbreeding, and especially the fact that the Neanderthal DNA seems mixed exclusively into our matrilineal line, Wragg Sykes writes:
There are hints in the DNA that couplings might have involved more Neanderthal men with H. sapiens women than the reverse, but other explanations for the data are possible. In theorising the social contexts behind all of this, there's been a tendency to assume rape as a primary mechanism; an unpleasant residue from the days when prehistorians and the public regarded Neanderthals as more beast than potential beloved. Chimpanzee males will engage in coercive sex, but not with unknown females (whom they prefer to kill.) It's theoretically possible some of our Neanderthal inheritance may derive from non-consensual circumstances, but xenophobia rather than xenophilia needn't be the default assumption.I get that a main thrust in Kindred is Wragg Sykes' desire for us to accept Neanderthals as fellow hominids, more like us than not, but if the DNA transfer seems to fairly definitively go only in the one direction, I don't know why she wants to so strongly defend the Neanderthals against the assumption of rape. And if they were more like us than any other species, why would she evoke chimps (and later, bonobos) as evidence in their defense when no one is likely to declare that human males don't "engage in coercive sex with unknown females". Again, this felt like political correctness for its own sake, but didn't bring down my overall enjoyment of and admiration for this book; I'm taking it as food for thought.
