Book summary “Kindred”: summary

Introduction

You carry a persistent image of Neanderthals as stooped, unintelligent brutes dragged down by primitive instincts. This caricature misrepresents our closest evolutionary cousins, who actually mastered diverse Eurasian landscapes long before modern humans arrived.

Neanderthals were not brutish cavemen but sophisticated, adaptable humans who shared vast Eurasian landscapes, complex tool cultures, and rich symbolic lives with our ancestors.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes restores their humanity through decades of recent archaeological breakthroughs. You will explore six major dimensions of their existence:

• How early fossil discoveries overcame extreme scientific bias
• Why their robust anatomy reflects specialized physical lives
• How they mastered stone tools and material technologies
• What strategies governed their subsistence and domestic spaces
• How they organized their society, childhood, and care
• Where their symbolic art and mortuary practices emerged

1. History of Discovery and Scientific Bias

Neanderthals became a distinct population 450 to 400 thousand years ago and endured for roughly 350,000 years until around 40 ka. They expanded across an immense Eurasian range spanning from north Wales to the borders of China and the fringes of Arabia's deserts.

Early fossil discoveries were plagued by skepticism and racist bias before modern stratigraphy proved their immense antiquity.

From Quarry Bones to Ancient Species

The first recognised Neanderthal fossil discovery occurred in late summer 1856 in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. Quarrying of the Kleine Feldhofer Cave revealed bones embedded in thick sediment that quarry workers cast down.

Quarry operations in the Düssel River gorge exposed the cave cavity, leading to the preservation of a skull cap and other remains that were later analyzed by Hermann Schaaffhausen.

The first discovered Neanderthal fossil was actually an unrecognised child skull found in 1829 at Awirs Cave in Belgium. Philippe-Charles Schmerling found parts of a child skull sealed beneath flowstone-cemented rubble alongside ancient creatures and stone tools.

A second adult Neanderthal skull was discovered in 1848 at Forbes' Quarry in Gibraltar, though it sat unremarked in collections for over a decade. Lieutenant Edmund Flint acquired the complete skull from limestone quarrying for military fortifications.

Scientific Controversy and Bias

Early Victorian critics and medical pioneers initially dismissed Neanderthal anatomical peculiarities as the result of disease, injury, or deformity rather than an extinct species. Rudolf Virchow suggested that the prominent brow ridges of the Feldhofer skull resulted from excessive frowning due to chronic pain.

Because direct dating methods did not exist until the development of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s, early prehistorians relied on the principle that sediments accumulate sequentially. Charles Lyell visited the Feldhofer Cave in 1860 to examine remaining deposits and helped secure scientific acceptance of the bones' antiquity.

The discovery of an engraved mammoth tusk at the La Madeleine rockshelter provided definitive proof that humans lived contemporaneously with extinct ice age fauna. During an excavation by Henry Christy and Édouard Lartet in 1864, workers uncovered a shattered piece of mammoth tusk bearing an engraving of a mammoth.

Neanderthal fossils and hunter-gatherer populations were weaponized by nineteenth and twentieth-century scientists to support white supremacy and eugenics. Ernst Haeckel classified lower races closer to beasts, and Boule compared Aboriginal Australians to the most primitive humans while discussing the La Chapelle discovery.

2. Anatomy, Body Proportions, and Physical Life

Neanderthal physical robustness and specialized sensory adaptations reflect demanding lifestyles across diverse climates rather than cold-climate reduction alone.

Most Hench Hominins

Neanderthals were shorter with broader chests, wider waists, and massively muscled thighs supported by thicker, rounder leg bones. Their skulls featured lower crowns, prominent brow ridges, an occipital bun, deep-set eyes, and unique jaw structures featuring a gap behind the wisdom teeth and shovel-shaped front teeth. At sites like El Sidrón and Krapina, thousands of fragmented remains demonstrate diverse population demographics and extensive physical robustness. The Krapina rockshelter produced 900 bones representing a minimum of 20 to 80 individuals, while the El Sidrón cave yielded 2,500 remains from 13 Neanderthals.

While cold-adapted species tend to have larger bodies and shorter limbs to reduce surface area and retain heat, recent research indicates Neanderthal compact size offered barely 1 degree Celsius of extra cold resistance. Their massive bodies, huge noses, and large chests were necessary metabolic fuel systems to support high energy expenditure and deep breathing during intensive daily activities across rugged landscapes. Neanderthals weighed about 15 per cent more than modern humans despite being shorter, and their skeletons were 10 per cent beefier than similarly stocky early modern human populations.

Faces and Senses

Larger eye sockets point to photo-absorbing retinas adapted for higher latitudes with dim winters, supported by a larger visual processing area in the occipital bun. Meanwhile, functional modelling of the tiny inner ear bones shows they transferred and amplified soundwaves identically to modern human ears, keeping them tuned to vocal communication. People from higher latitudes developed eyeball sizes about 20 percent larger than those living near the equator.

The massive nasal apertures and internal nasal structures of Neanderthals provided exceptional airflow control rather than functioning primarily as cold-weather air conditioners. Microscopic studies show huge numbers of bone-growth cells pushing the mid-face forward. Nostril airflow modelling confirms that their nasal set-up was nearly a third larger than living humans, allowing them to inhale air at almost twice the rate.

Neanderthal dominant arms were between 25 to 60 percent more developed than their non-dominant sides, a pattern matching modern tennis players or cricketers. Electrode monitoring experiments reveal this muscle-flexing pattern matches one-handed skin scraping, an arduous task consuming over 100 hours annually per individual.

During the MIS 5e Eemian interglacial, global temperatures rose 2 to 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, melting polar ice and driving sea levels 8 meters higher. Neanderthals adapted to these dense forests, lakeshores, and changing ecologies around 123 ka, hunting diverse fauna including straight-tusked elephants, hippos, and macaques. At Neumark-Nord in eastern Germany, lakebed sediments preserved over 120,000 animal bone fragments, proving Neanderthals intensively butchered prey even as forests grew dense and thick.

Far from being restricted to arctic tundra, Neanderthals utilized coastal resources like shellfish and marine mammals, scaled high-altitude mountain ranges up to 2,000 meters in the Alps and Carpathians, and adapted to arid environments in Central Asia, demonstrating complete environmental flexibility. At Ibex Cave high up on the Gibraltar cliffs, Neanderthals hunted ibex and utilized the elevated vantage point to survey the coastal plains below.

3. Stone Tools and Material Technologies

Stone tools, known as lithics, serve as the fundamental atoms of Neanderthal life and provide archaeologists with deep insights into their culture. Each lithic possesses a unique chronological and technological history from its geological formation to the day a Neanderthal picked it up. Prehistorians initially focused on visual classifications and typologies like the Mousterian, but modern experts use extensive analysis and 4D refitting to mentally reconstruct how each artifact was created.

Neanderthals mastered complex stone-knapping techniques, woodworking, composite tools, and animal bone retouchers to shape their material world.

In 1834, de Jouannet produced an early chronological typology. John Lubbock coined the term Palaeolithic in 1865.

Taming Your Rock

The Levallois prepared core technology allowed Neanderthals to systematically control the shape and size of flakes, blades, and points. Victor Commont discovered distinctive large flakes and cores in the industrial quarries of Levallois-Perret near Paris. Middle Palaeolithic flaking first appears in Africa around 500 ka, while Neanderthal anatomy fully materializes in Europe from 400 to 350 ka. Giant flakes and points made in Britain and northern France reach sizes of 10 to 15cm.

Discoid technology provided Neanderthals with an efficient, zero-waste system optimized for producing ready-to-use flakes with natural backs. At Fumane Cave in the southern Italian Alps, excavators reconstructed a Discoid core sequence where a Neanderthal knapped over 60 flakes in 10 phases from a single stream cobble dating to approximately 46,000 years ago. This Layer A9 assemblage contained over 8,000 lithics, relying on local stone sources within a 15km distance threshold.

The Quina techno-complex specialized in producing thick, robust flakes designed to withstand intense, repeated resharpening. Excavations at Jonzac revealed masses of reindeer bones and Quina lithics that were intensively used for butchery, resharpening, and eventually transformed into hammers or anvils. Through ramification, Neanderthals took primary flakes and further reduced them into mini-cores to produce secondary and even tertiary generations of tiny tools like bladelets. At Coustal Cave, a refitting study showed a Neanderthal converting a long serrated jasper flake into a core and back again through eight stages across a 1m² area. In Combe Grenal between 85 and 70 ka, bladelets accounted for up to a fifth of artifacts.

Modern total-collection archaeology and techno-economics reveal that Neanderthals made rational, sophisticated choices about stone transport and edge maintenance. At Le Moustier, modern high-resolution excavations recovered artefact densities roughly 30 times greater than early twentieth-century collections. When you examine these sites, you must apply rigorous recovery methods:

• plot the precise 3D coordinates of pieces over 2cm using lasers;
• locate anything smaller within a 50cm grid square;
• recover minuscule splinters through wet sieving.

Combe Grenal features a sequence depth of 50 layers across 13m.

Material World and Wood Technology

Neanderthals possessed sophisticated woodworking skills and crafted specialized wooden tools, including heavy-duty throwing and thrusting spears as well as digging sticks. At Schöningen in Germany, researchers found a Spear Horizon containing finely tapered wooden spears dating between 337 and 300 ka alongside butchered horse remains. The Lehringen and Schöningen spears measure 2.5m long, and the preserved Schöningen sediment block covers 4,000m².

Rock shelters preserve perishable Neanderthal wooden artifacts through calcium carbonate deposition, revealing items such as platters and cleaver-shaped domestic tools. Flowstone deposition at Abric Romaní occurred 27 times across 12 layers spanning 40,000 years, preserving items like curved wooden objects dated between 50 and 45 ka.

Neanderthals pioneered composite tools by assembling multiple parts using bindings and sophisticated manufactured adhesives like birch tar and modified conifer resin. At Königsaue in Germany, two small black lumps of birch tar dating around 85 to 74 ka bore the imprints of a lithic tool, a wooden surface, and a partial Neanderthal fingerprint. Artifacts from Syria preserve 50,000-year-old bitumen residues, and Fossellone Cave and Sant'Agostino Cave yielded resin samples dating from 55 to 45 ka.

Neanderthals systematically transformed animal carcasses into bone quarries, heavily utilizing specific limb bone shards as retouchers to shape and resharpen lithic tools. A 50m² area at Schöningen contained 15 massive bone hammers, while reinvestigation of Quina layers at Les Pradelles identified some 700 retouchers where they were twice as common as lithics. Neanderthals consistently chose bone shards with a 5cm minimum length.

4. Subsistence, Diet, and Domestic Space

Neanderthals were apex hunters targeting megafauna, small game, and plant foods, organizing their living spaces meticulously around hearths.

You find that Neanderthals required a massive daily caloric intake to support their robust bodies and large brains in cold environments. They needed between 3,500 and 5,000 kilocalories daily, and up to 7,000 kilocalories in harsh environments without insulating clothes. A group of 10 Neanderthals required 300,000 kilocalories to feed them for a week.

Archaeological evidence proves that Neanderthals were primary hunters rather than scavengers who stole scraps from other predators. At Fumane Cave Level A9 in Italy, only 0.1 per cent of bones showed carnivore damage while butchery rates were at least 15 per cent.

Neanderthals systematically hunted massive and dangerous megafauna, utilizing strategic landscapes and collaborative tactics. At Schöningen, they hunted extinct horses weighing 500kg. At La Cotte de St Brelade, bone heaps contained a minimum of 18 mammoths.

Neanderthal butchery prioritized fat, marrow, brains, and organs over lean meat to balance their nutritional intake and avoid protein poisoning. Brains provided 60 per cent fat content. At Schöningen, Neanderthals skinned and butchered horses to take marrow from lower limbs, tongues, and internal organs while leaving much of the lean meat behind.

Neanderthals regularly exploited small game, birds, fish, and tortoises. At Oliveira Cave, 5,700 tortoise remains representing at least 80 animals were recovered. You can trace how they processed tortoises using specific steps:

• Roast tortoises upside-down to weaken the shell and soften the meat
• Hammer open the roasted shell
• Tear off the limbs
• Slice out the innards

At Les Canalettes Layer 4, 70 per cent of identified bones came from butchered rabbits. Walou Cave yielded 300 freshwater fish bones and scales.

Plant foods were a vital component of the Neanderthal diet. Shanidar 3 preserved dental calculus containing date palms, legumes, and roots, with 40 per cent of starches appearing to have been boiled. Spy individuals preserved waterlily root starches.

Neanderthals were fundamentally nomadic, moving across extensive home ranges rather than staying permanently in single locations. Most lithics came from a local radius of 5 to 10 kilometers. Artifacts made of higher-quality stone from distant sources exceeded 60 kilometers, reaching maximum recorded distances of 300 kilometers for flint and obsidian.

Home Design and Domestic Space

Hearths served as the central organizing cores for Neanderthal domestic life and spatial planning. At Abric Romaní, Level O contained 40,000 objects across a 270m2 surface under 1m thickness, showing distinct phases of human presence around hearths within a few centuries.

Neanderthals systematically organized their living spaces, separating task areas and regularly disposing of waste. At Kebara Cave, researchers excavated three circular accumulations of animal remains containing over 3,000 bones embedded in tiny bone slivers and organic stains, measuring 1m in diameter.

Neanderthals furnished their living spaces with plant bedding, hide mats, and constructed windbreaks or shelters. At the 84 to 72 ka campsite at La Folie, a 10cm thick and 10m extent archaeological layer revealed a circular series of small slanted pits ringed by limestone blocks, representing pole-and-hide structures.

5. Society, Childhood, and Care

Neanderthal groups maintained demographic diversity and genetic health through wide-reaching social networks, seasonal gatherings, and potential resource exchange. Despite low total population estimates, genetic diversity and long-distance stone transport suggest that neighboring bands or wandering individuals regularly encountered one another. An average mobile hunter-gatherer band contained about 25 people.

At slaughter sites like Mauran for bison and Salzgitter-Lebenstedt for reindeer, prey gluts reduced competition and provided opportunities for inter-group socialization and exchange.

Crafts and Materials

Neanderthals were accomplished hide workers who performed complex, multi-stage processing involving cleaning, soaking, softening, and smoothing animal skins. Hide preparation required rigorous daily effort, including scraping fresh skins and utilizing specialized tools such as bone lissoirs or teeth wear for clamping and stretching to produce durable clothing and shelters. Making a single set of hide garments from scratch required 20 to 80 hours of processing time.

Five shaped bone lissoirs or smoothers made from rib ends have been discovered at Pech de l’Azé and Abri Peyrony, showing use-wear matching tools used to soften and burnish skins. These two sites are separated by a 35km distance.

• Remove all gore from fresh skins immediately to prevent fats from congealing
• Soak skins using water mixed with wood ash or inside natural containers to extract grease
• Work the fatty mixture into the skin through continuous stretching and manipulation
• Smoke the skin using rotten wood to preserve the hide and keep it soft

Care and Social Networks

Isotopic analysis of Neanderthal teeth reveals details about breastfeeding duration, weaning age, and early childhood diets. A Neanderthal child from Scladina lived around 100 ka, while another child's tooth was studied via micro-sampling at 240 ka. Neanderthal mothers required 500 extra calories per day for milk production.

At the Grotte du Renne in Arcy-sur-Cure, a one-year-old child's remains yielded extremely high nitrogen levels, pointing to heavy breastfeeding. The Engis child from Belgium, aged 5 or 6, also showed high nitrogen levels, indicating an unusual childhood diet such as freshwater fish or specialized animal parts.

Dental analysis reveals that Neanderthal children often grew and lost their milk teeth at a faster tempo than modern human children. Researchers count inner growth lines called perikymata in teeth. Some Neanderthals lost milk teeth 1 to 3 years faster. The Roc de Marsal child, found in 1961, showed estimated skeletal ages between 2.5 and 4 years old. Synchrotron radiation microtomography revealed complex development where teeth lagged behind bone age. Young Neanderthals are also represented by 7-month-olds in the fossil record.

Neanderthal groups routinely provided long-term care and provisioning for injured, sick, or disabled members who could not survive independently.

Multiple Neanderthal skeletons exhibit severe healed traumas, such as skull wounds, amputations, and sensory impairments, indicating they survived for years through the active support, feeding, and protection of their companions. Shanidar 3 survived more than two weeks after a chest stab wound before death. Shanidar 1 lived to an old age despite being partially blind, deaf in one ear, having a chopped-off arm, and suffering from severe mobility issues and arthritis.

Three living generations were likely normal for Neanderthals. Surviving Neanderthals became goldmines of wisdom in times of crisis around age 40, with identifiable elderly individuals reaching over 60 years old. Elders who reached advanced ages served as repositories of sagacity, remembering past climate shifts, migration routes, and crisis management strategies.

6. Symbolic Life, Art, and Mortuary Practices

Neanderthal culture encompassed pigment collection, subterranean architecture, raptor talon display, and complex body processing.

Symbolic Life and Art

You discover that Neanderthals built a monumental subterranean structure deep inside Bruniquel Cave. The construction involved over 400 broken and arranged stalagmites.

In Bruniquel Cave, south-west France, cavers broke through roof-fall debris in 1990 to find two ring structures made of 400 snapped stalagmites located 300 meters inside the cave, featuring burned areas and bear bone fragments. Uranium-series methods in 2013 dated these formations to 178,6 and 174.4 ka. The largest ring measured more than 6 by 4 meters, using over two tonnes of speleofacts that required at least six to seven hours to build.

You also find that Neanderthals systematically collected, modified, and mixed various mineral pigments and substances across more than 70 European sites. At Cueva de los Aviones in Spain, red ochre was found on dog cockle shells, and analysis revealed a recipe containing haematite, goethite, black carbon, limestone, and sparkly pyrite. Uranium-series dating of calcite crusts in Iberian caves such as Ardales, La Pasiega, and Maltravieso suggests early artistic creations, including a hand stencil at Maltravieso that yielded a dating sample older than 54,000 years.

You trace incised lines, patterns, and sets of notches into minerals, cortex surfaces, and animal bones. On a hyaena bone from Les Pradelles just 5 centimeters long, a Neanderthal made nine parallel incisions accompanied by eight minuscule nicks intersecting in pairs. Faunal evidence also indicates that Neanderthals targeted large raptors and corvids. At Krapina, eight butchered white-tailed eagle talons and a toe bone were found to feature smoothed-over cut marks and contact polish.

Mortuary Practices and Grief

You observe exceptional bodily preservation and positioning that strongly suggest intentional deposition. The Old Man at La Chapelle-aux-Saints was found remarkably intact at the base of a sunken pit in 1908, with neck vertebrae supported by sediment indicating the head did not simply tumble off during unassisted rot. At Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus Mountains, a week-old infant skeleton was found around 70,000 years ago lying on its right side with flexed knees and a side-lying posture atop distinct charcoal fragments.

You notice that body processing and cannibalism were practiced by Neanderthals in various regions. At Moula-Guercy, half of the remains from six Neanderthals displayed intensive processing cut marks, yet the site's environment and access to abundant forest game contradict simple famine-driven cannibalism.

Cannibalism and body processing likely served as a primal form of grief management and intimate interaction with the deceased rather than violent inter-group aggression. At Krapina and Les Pradelles, specific thigh and lower leg bone fragments from processed hominins were selected and fashioned into bone retouchers used for stone-tool work.

10 Key Ideas

1. Neanderthals endured across an immense Eurasian range for roughly 350,000 years until early fossil discoveries were plagued by scientific bias and racist assumptions.
2. Their robust anatomy, specialized facial structures, and massive physical proportions reflect demanding lifestyles and high energy expenditure across diverse climates rather than simple cold-climate reduction.
3. Neanderthals mastered complex stone-knapping techniques like Levallois and Quina systems, alongside woodworking, composite tools, and animal bone retouchers.
4. They operated as apex hunters targeting megafauna, small game, and plant foods while organizing their living spaces meticulously around hearths.
5. Neanderthal groups maintained wide-reaching social networks and performed complex, multi-stage hide processing to produce durable clothing and shelters.
6. Isotopic analysis and dental studies reveal details about Neanderthal childhood growth tempos, breastfeeding duration, and early diets.
7. Neanderthal groups routinely provided long-term care and provisioning for injured, sick, or disabled members who could not survive independently.
8. Their rich symbolic culture encompassed mineral pigment collection, subterranean architectural rings, raptor talon display, and incised bone patterns.
9. Neanderthals practiced intentional mortuary deposition and body processing that likely served as a primal form of grief management and intimate interaction with the deceased.
10. Modern archaeological breakthroughs have thoroughly dismantled the caricature of Neanderthals as brutish cavemen, revealing them to be sophisticated and adaptable humans.