There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials
featuring Neandertals--some serious, some comical. But what was it
really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or
different from ours?
In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and
psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant
account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most
recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal
remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples
of their genes--one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more
provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be
related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and
ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range
of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been
different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge)
vocabulary--words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and
emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and
living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that
Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most
of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the
evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture--looking at their
treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body
coloring--and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of
the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their
lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with
spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They
were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite.
Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of
Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished
people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds
and culture.
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