The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Silmak
Over the last few years, there have been some inspiring books that have come out regarding our ancient cousins, or ancestors depending on how you look at them; the Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis. What may come to many peoples mind, is Kindred by Dr. Rebecca Wray Sykes, which brought the world of the Neanderthals to the public for the first time in a way that made them not seem so distant from us. In her book she argues the case that the archaeological evidence that is present, is enough to represent a human culture so like our own, that if they were alive today, we could even imagine them in a suit and tie.
Many people quite enjoyed this perception, from the public to those in the field and researchers as well. From what we know, Neanderthals were a very advanced branch of the hominin family bush, the braided stream that makes up our ancestry. They had weapons, most of which have been found were thrusting weapons, for close combat. But there has been evidence of throwing weapons as well. We have evidence of advanced burial practices, such as those highlighted in the recent documentary collaboration between BBC and Netflix, Secrets of the Neanderthals, featuring the team working at Shanidar, a cave in Iraq where multiple bodies of Neanderthals have been found in what can only be described as buried together. With one of them potentially being the home of an out lay of flowers over time.
Silmak however, in his book the Naked Neanderthal does not agree with many of the ideas out forward separating the Neanderthals from the dumb brutes that they had always been known. He seems to want to take the new theories and hypotheses about them, and well, throw them out the window. He presents his ideas, and he is a very experienced researcher, working on a site that has had a small amount of archaeology, for twenty five years, at the Madrin Cave, and doing some work elsewhere in Siberia. He does know what he is talking about when it comes to Neanderthals, but his ideas on who they were, how we can understand them, and even where they went, vary quite much from other experts on the topic, and he beautifully explains these points in his books. I will not spoil for you what those views are, and how they differ from he convention knowledge of what we now accept Neanderthals to be, but I do think it is worth to the read. For I will completely agree with him on this, we cannot know the Neanderthal, it is a creature, a human, an ape, whatever you want to call them, that is gone from this earth. With so little evidence of them left behind, we will never truly know them. As my good fiend Genevieve says, “It is like we are trying to rebuild the past by looking into a room through a keyhole for a couple of seconds, and then having to draw everything that we see. There are going to be many missing items and gaps”.
And that is how it is with the fossil record, whether it comes to Neanderthals or any other hominin species. We know oh so very little, so much has been lost to the millennia.
So at this point you may be wondering, is this a good book to read? Yes, but with a caveat. It should not be the first book that someone picks up on Neanderthals. The ideas expressed in the book are not the consensus on many topics when it comes to interpretations of archaeological finds and data. His ideas are a worthy of note however, as we should always keep our minds open, as again, we can never truly know. So seeing things from a different perspective can do nothing but benefit our general understanding of this human creature.
World of Paleoanthropology 