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