Explore Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art in Kindred

wingedbull: I bought this after hearing the author on The infinite monkey cage. It is a good read but technical in parts especially when talking about excavating.

United Kingdom on Oct 02, 2023

M. LARKIN: As with many people I have an interest in t
his topic. I found this book to comprehensive and for me just on the edge of too 'in depth'. A good place to be as I felt it stretched my mind. On a number of occasions I needed to slow down a little and sometimes re-read a page of two in order to get back on track. I found that this book rewarded the effort however. It is a comprehensive analysis of Neanderthals and has widened my knowledge -base of the subject. Recommended!

United Kingdom on Jul 24, 2023

Kindle Customer: This book has been a fascinating read from beginning to end. It blows away all misconceptions about our cousin species, the Neanderthals and opens up a wide vista on the possibilities of what their lives may have been like. Some elements were hard to follow, such as the chapter on stone and bone technologies employed by Neanderthals. On the whole, though, it was very easy to read for someone with little academic knowledge of the subject.

United Kingdom on Apr 29, 2023

red slider: "Kindred" is a seminal and heuristic look into the life and culture of our biological kin. It is well-organized into chapters, each focused on a different aspect of the most important features of Neanderthal life—their environment, tools and tool-making, what they ate, how they hunt, and so forth. I think no one would question that it is solidly grounded in an exhaustive study of the scientific literature regarding Neanderthals and the paleo-archeological records we have about them to date. The scientific credentials of the author also assure us that it was written by someone fully conversant with the subject matter, both as a scientist and as an observer of the unfolding story of our sibling species. I think most readers would agree with these statements. But that is not why I chose to award "Kindred" 5-stars, as I did.

Science writing is an especially tough subspecialty of storytelling. More so that It not only must meet the demands and accuracy of nonfiction narrative writing, but equally requires the art of the translator in two of the most challenging aspects of translation. First, of course, is translating very specialized materials, familiar only to those that...

United States on Sep 27, 2022

Robin E. Levin: This book brings us up to date on the latest scientific thinking about the Neanderthals. The book is for readers who are intensely interested in the subject. It contains a lot of archeological jargon and minutiae, but an interested reader will learn a lot from reading it. For me it raised more questions than it answered.
Were the Neanderthals a sub race of Homo Sapiens or were they a different species? They had larger brains than modern Homo Sapiens but the brain matter was somewhat differently distributed. Their sculls were shaped differently and they were stockier with a heavier bone structure. They could and did interbreed with Homo Sapiens and produce viable and fertile offspring. In fact, among humans not living in Sub Saharan Africa, about two percent of the genome comes from Neanderthal ancestry.
Were Neanderthals as intelligent as Homo Sapiens? Different groups developed fairly complex tool making technologies each with their distinctive methods of working stone. They experimented with glues using resins, pitch and other sticky substances in order to bind their sharpened stones to their wooden shafts. They experimented with pigments. They certainly wore furs and...

United States on Nov 15, 2021

Joe Lawlor: I have finished the book kindred twice now, once by reading it myself and once in audiobook format.

The short answer to my review is I enjoyed it.

It's a great book if you're interested in the archeology surrounding Neanderthals and you want to get a better grasp of them. I especially like the parts where she talks about their tools and the different techno complexes, as well as the skeletal remains, animal remains/ debitage in the caves and open-air sites and finally then the art of the neanderthals. It also solidified some of my theories that Neanderthals were using red ochre as their primary pigments as well as for grinding down bone tools such as lissiors and many other things like possible camouflage, hide working, tanning hides and mixing it with natural pitches for glue.
The book goes into a lot of scientific details but the author explains it in a way in which the average person can understand it. She talks about the various climates Neanderthals lived in, the various animals Neanderthals ate in specific areas, a bunch of the tools Neanderthal clans used in their vast range and much more. One of my favourite Parts in the book is when the author starts...

Canada on Jan 12, 2021

Amazon Customer: There is a very clear agenda in "Kindred" :- unpacking the cultural myth of Neanderthals as brutal, primitive "cave men" and instead showing them as intelligent, caring and creative in a way that it both eerily similar to our own species but also subtlety different.

As someone with a passing knowledge of the subject already, I was already on board with this idea, but I still learnt a lot from a book that draws the threads of scientific investigation together to paint a picture of homes, hearths and love in another species. Littered fragments of bone and flint on a cave floor are painstakingly pieced together to show how the daily lives of Neanderthals showed planning, invention and compassion. As a lay person I found it a little difficult to envision the described stone working technologies described, as even detailed explanations of the physics of tool making are hard to imagine without holding the rock in your own hand. But despite this, the conclusions of the author are clear - the patterns found in these stone tools only make sense if their users were thinking about every aspect of their creation.

At every turn "Kindred" overturns the simplistic ideas we are told...

United Kingdom on Sep 24, 2020