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 not all new for me.

That being said, it is a very interesting book, written in an accessible and casual style, despite the scientific information. There are quite a few illustrations and photographs, and a bibliography divided into sections for the general reader; the specialist reader: books; the specialist reader: articles; and fiction. Oddly, in this updated edition, they do not source Wragg Sykes’s book or research, even though it’s more recent than their own.

The structure of the book is from the historical background of the early discoveries and research of the Neanderthals through to the last-known evidence of their existence about 40,000 years ago. However, the final chapter is the weakest part of the book and for me was dissonant with the first part.

From the title of the final chapter, “Still With Us?,” I thought it would be about the genetic research that proves that homo sapiens today have a small percent of Neanderthal genes in their DNA, even though that was also covered in the chapter, “An End to Isolation.”

However, it was about the stereotypes of the Neanderthals as sluggish, club-carrying, ape-like cavemen (we never hear about cavewomen!) that have been a part of films, advertisements, illustrations, cartoons, and fiction (hence the “fiction” section of the bibliography). This chapter is 27½ pages long, with example illustrations. There is even a section about the names chosen for Neanderthals in books and films. This seemed so out of place in a book about a “scientific revolution.”

And I also found the title at odds with the information in the book. Perhaps “rediscovered” refers to the more recent information about the Neanderthals that reveals they had an advanced tool culture, were not so different from us in appearance, and had aspects of art and culture that were not known before. But I am still not sure what the “Scientific Revolution” refers to. The scientific techniques and type of research that has been used is not really new – certainly not new enough to be considered a “revolution.” This is not made clear anywhere in the book.

But this is probably too much nitpicking on my part. For readers who are interested in this subject and want to get a good overview of the latest information without too much technical detail, this is an excellent choice.