The Naked Neanderthal
A New Understanding of the Human Creature
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- $399.00
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- $399.00
Descripción editorial
A riveting scientific journey exploring the enigma of the Neanderthal and the species’ unique form of intelligence.
What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals?
For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different -- and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence, very different from ours.
Slimak has travelled around the world for the past thirty years to uncover who the Neanderthals really were. A modern-day Indiana Jones, he takes us on a fascinating archaeological investigation: from the Arctic Circle to the deep Mediterranean forests, he traces the steps of these enigmatic creatures, working to decipher their real stories through every single detail they left behind.
A thought-provoking adventure story, written with wit and verve, The Naked Neanderthal shifts our understanding of deep history -- and in the process reveals just how much we have yet to learn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ho-hum study, Slimak (The Last Neanderthal), a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France, examines what recent anthropological findings reveal about the lives of Neanderthals. Slimak argues Neanderthals were "an utterly different humanity" than Homo sapiens and thrived in Eurasia from 350 to 40 thousand years ago before sapiens' arrival on the continent from Africa led to Neanderthal "eradication." Evaluating theories of how Neanderthals went extinct, Slimak contends that human species are highly adaptable, making it unlikely that changes in climate killed the Neanderthals. Instead, he asserts that sapiens' technologically superior weapons gave them an edge when it came to hunting game. Unfortunately, the uncertainty that permeates much of the volume will leave readers with more questions than answers; for instance, Slimak notes that scientists aren't sure of the boundaries of where Neanderthals lived, and the high margin of error in carbon-dating ancient sites has made it difficult to determine if many of the alleged Neanderthal artifacts even belonged to them. Slimak also appears more preoccupied with poking holes in other scientists' theories than discussing what Neanderthals were like, as when he posits that the claws, shells, and feathers that some scientists argue constituted Neanderthal "art" were just collections of objects that bear no signs of "deliberate artisanal modification." Only devoted students of the Paleolithic will find this dig worth the effort.
