The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story
My first book review for the 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge is in the category Science . One of my amateur interests is archaeology, and I find the Neanderthals particularly interesting. Fortunately, most of what we know about our hominid cousins has been found or studied fairly recently – mostly in the last ten years. Last year I enjoyed Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art , 2020, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (see my post of February 24, 2022). But then at the end of the year I found a book that was published earlier (2013, 2015 and updated in 2022): The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story by Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse (revised and updated edition). It’s hard not to compare the two books, so I would have to say I enjoyed Kindred better. Somehow Wragg Sykes’s writing was both more scientific and more enthusiastic about the subject. But perhaps it’s because much of the information in The Neanderthals Rediscovered was ...