Then I was more or less ordered to get Kindred out of the library. That would be Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art [review] by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. It's pretty good. A Lot of progress has been made in tech and archaeological practice over the last 20-30 years.
① It is now much easier to record electronically the x y z co-ordinates of every bone and artifact so that the whole structure can be reconstructed in fully zoomable rotatable 3D back on the lab computer screen.
② Archaeologists have found the patience to reattach stone chips which were sundered by neanderthal blows 50,000 years ago. This can inform about the percussive techniques used in the first place. Scanning microscopes can find differences in the wear grooves on neanderthal teeth and tools. A modern database has been built up to record the what wear results from scraping hides and how that differs from severing tendons or dis-articulating bone. Comparative flint-knapping is almost a profession in modern archaeological circles.
③ DNA! I was in the lab next door when Dan Bradley was extracting ancient DNA from ancient bones, and parchment pages to make sense of the history of domestication and incest in Ireland and Europe. Neanderthal DNA is perhaps 10x older but, with luck and care and PCR, enough DNA of sufficient quality can be obtained from neanderthal bones to recognise it as distinctive and distinctively different from "us" Homo sapiens. As 23andMe will tell you, there has been detectable inflow of neandergenes into our ancestors . . . but apparently not in the other direction.
There's a lot we don't know, but it is wonderful how much information has been wrung from a few tonnes of bones representing another way of being a bipedal hominid ape. It's like an alternative running of the experiment over 600,000 years.
A peculiar footnote on p113: " . . . Aboriginal knappers paid as much attention to the overall appearance of their scrapers as Westerners do to their pencil-sharpeners" i.o.w. not at all? What colour is your pencil-sharpener? I have no idea!
When oh when will Usians get with the program and learn about centimeters? Obvs, the USA is the largest English-language book-buying market in the World, so no author wishes to gratuitously alienate readers by giving all distances in versts. But really, everybody [who can read a 400 page academic-adjacent book about Neanderthals] understands metric even if we in Ireland still weigh babies in lbs and know our height in ft&ins. The editors at Bloomsbury have used cm, m, km, m2, kg as primary measurement while appending equivalents as in, ft, mi, yd2, and lb in (brackets). Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds but I will point out that 0.5m is variously made equivalent to 1½ft, 20in & 2ft. Number-crunchers gotta data, and I went through the first half of the book to clock the range of values given for m/ft ratios (converting mi to ft by * 1760 * 3 and in to ft by /12): count N=50; mean 0.309; st.dev 0.023; min 0.25; max 0.4. That std.dev is pretty tight: the mean is 1-2% above the everybody knows value of 30.5cm. There are officially 3.281 feet to the metre or 0.3047 m to the ft.
I really like the editorial decision to use micro drawings of palaeolithic artifacts at colophons through the text - raptor-claw [L], pierced shell, flake, feather. Feathers? Many neander-sites reveal a disproportionate number of avian wings, often corvids. I propose that black wings made great eyebrow enhancers 70,000 years ago in France.
There's an effective index but no list of references: proper order for a "popular" science book. It's coming up for Christmas: might make a nice gift for a reading teen. We defo need more archaeologists.
and More women in science!
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