He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Many chapters, including 35 pages on the Neanderthal diet, reveal almost too much, but Wragg Sykes clearly loves her subject, so educated readers will have no trouble absorbing the spectacular revelations of modern anthropology.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Scientists scrape plaque from old teeth, put it under the microscope, and learn what they ate, the parasites they harbored, the tools they built, and the smoke they breathed. High-tech scanners and computers pour out a stream of revelations.

Modern scientists return to old sites and carefully sift through tons of dirt to retrieve bits of vegetation, chemicals, bone fragments, microfossils, pollen, and trash. Early field researchers carried off bones and tools and discarded everything else. Appearing in Europe about 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals possessed impressive hunting skills, a complex social life, and technology as advanced as modern Homo sapiens, who arrived about 50,000 years ago and drove them to extinction 10,000 years ago-for reasons about which Wragg Sykes and her colleagues continue to speculate. Beneath massively muscled thighs were thicker, rounder and slightly curved leg bones…unlike countless inaccurate reconstructions they absolutely walked as upright as us.” Dressed properly and passing on a city street, a Neanderthal would attract no attention. Despite countless popular portrayals, the average Neanderthal was not a hunchbacked caveman: “Somewhat shorter than average,” writes the author, “with broader chests and little waists, their limb proportions were also slightly different. Since some experts insisted that these were simply a contemporary with bone disease, serious study only began at the end of the century after more discoveries. Although not the first, the Neanderthal bones unearthed by German miners in 1856 were the first recognized as different from modern humans. Wragg Sykes has made a career studying Neanderthals, and she skillfully lays out a massive amount of information, much of which has turned up over the past few decades. Everything you ever wanted to know about our closest relative.

Kindred neanderthal book review