After 20 years and there’s been a lot of writing about human evolution, I still think the most complicated thing about this craft is portraying our ancestors and relatives from the remote past as real people, with their own worldviews and idiosyncrasies, without ending up just doing fiction. cheap science. If anyone has succeeded in this endeavor, the beast’s name is Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a British archaeologist who has written the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on Neanderthals to date.
Sykes is the author of “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art”; ). The book, may the reader forgive my informality, is so good, bringing together a gigantic amount of information about all aspects of the lives of those who were humanity’s closest relatives, practically our cousins (with whom, by the way, we interbred in the final phase of the Ice Age).
The book’s richness of detail is so great that there is sometimes a risk of getting lost in what we know about the manufacture of instruments or the diet of creatures. But Sykes alleviates this partial weight of narrative with an almost clairvoyant ability to create scenarios of everyday life and even the inner life of the actor. homo neanderthalensis based on the archaeological record.
In these attempts, one of the goals is to imagine how the act of dealing with the manufacture of stones or the bodies of captured animals, cutting, shredding and reassembling objects, could be the key to understanding how the Neanderthal mind worked. This is a very difficult view to prove empirically, but the pieces seem to fit together.
Here’s the crowd so that the book also reaches the hands of the Brazilian public.
Reinaldo José Lopes (@reinaldojlopes) / Twitter
Reinaldo José Lopes (@reinaldojoselopes) • Photos and videos from Instagram
Reinaldo José Lopes – YouTube
