Body
OUR EARLY FOREBEARS Continue to
be very good at getting in the news.
In 2003, on the island of Flores in
Indonesia, a team of archaeologists invest
igating the movement of humans from Asia
to Australia tound a nearly intact small
skeleton of what turned out to be an entire
ly new kind of human being: Homo fiores
iensis. The fact that its body was diminutive
caused it to be immediately given the idiot
ic nickname 'hobbit' - because nothing re
sembles Tolkien's stolidly Anglo agrarians
so much as a so,o0o-year-old dwarf hom-
inid skeleton from South-East Asia. The
cutesy nickname also deflected attention
from just how consequential this find was:
a new branch on the increasingly complic-
ated family tree of humanity. In 2008, a
team investigating Denisova Cave in Sib-
eria- named after a former inhabitant, the
18th-century Old Believer hermit Denis -
found bones which, when DNA tested,
turned out to be yet another entirely new
branch of human: Homo denisova, the Den-
isovans. More front pages ensued. Homo
antecessor has been gone from the planet for
several hundred thousand years, but she
was at the top of the news bulletins in
May 2013 when a set of footprints appeared
on a beach in Happisburgh, north Norfolk.
The prints were 850,0oo years old, the
oldest human footprints outside Africa and
by far the earliest mark of human presence
in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long
hidden marks of a group of H. antecesor
walking upriver: an adult and a group of
children travelling along the muddy est
uary where the Thames used to meet the
sea, until glaciers shifted its course south-
wards 450,000 years ago. The exposed foot
prints had to be photographed and model-
led at speed, before the tide washed them
away days later. It's a beautiful and eerie
concatenation: a fleting moment from the
Lower Palaeolithic, hidden for almost a mil-
lion years, suddenly exposed, and hurriedly
captured for all time by modern archaeo
logy, before its permanent erasure by wind
many other schlocky but hugely entertain-
ing novels about Neanderthals and their
Homo sapiens contemporaries. To think use-
fully about the Neanderthals, you need both
the science and the permission to let your
imagination roam. There has been a huge
amount of research into H. neanderthalensis
in recent decades, and much of it has the
effect of disrupting, contradicting or flat
out disproving the received image of our
closest human relatives. The key idea here,
summed up in the title of Wragg Sykes's
book, is that other types of human are our
relatives, and they are complete versions of
themselves, just as H. sapiens is of itself.
Twenty Types of Human
John Lanchester
KINDRED: NEANDERTHAL LIFE, LoVE, DEATH AND ART
by Rebecca Wragg Sykes.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp, £20, August, 978 1 4729 3749 0
This includes four living genera, Pongo, the
orangutans; Pan, chimpanzees and bon-
obos; Gorilla; and Homo, of which we are
the only surviving exemplar.") Our fascin
ation with our relatives has been consistent
since the discovery of the first Neanderthal
bones in Germany in 1856: on the site of a
quarry near Düsseldort, workmen excavat-
ed remains which were clearly similar to,
but not quite the same as, Homo sapiens.
That feeling of similar-but-not-quite is
present all through the history of our en
gagement with the Neanderthals: when we
look at them we are looking at a distorted
reflection in a mirror. As with a mirror
gazer, we have a tendency to want every-
thing to be about us. The reflection is
fascinating, unsettling, and it's not quite
clear what we want it to tell us.
In the case of the Neanderthals, the
sense of distance and the sense of strange-
ness are stronger; empathy seems both
more necessary and more remote, harder
to access. I have stood at the site of a
Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South
of France and ben hit by an overwhelm-
ingly strong feeling of remoteness, the
idea that these people, these similar-but-
different humans, were so far from any-
where human and place-like that they must
have been hiding from something. Their
very existence we now know there were
only a few tens of thousands of Neander
thals alive at any one time seems con-
tingent and marginal. What were they try-
The human family is complicated and,
as the science develops, it is getting more
so. We might want there to be a clear line
of descent from the first hominin fossils,
through various intermediate forms, to us;
but the story just isn't that simple, and in-
stead we now know that there were more
than twenty different types of human, much
of the time coexisting. H. habilis, H. rudolf
ensis and H. engaster are hominin species
from the deep African past. H. antecessor,
who left those footprints on that beach
in Norfolk, might well be the ancestor of
H.sapiens, H. neanderthalensis and H. denisova;
Homo erectus, the longest-lasting of all
human species, and the dominant type of
human in Asia for almost a million years,
is a separate branch; there's also H. naledi
in Africa, H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis
in South-East Asia, and possibly a kind of
archaic human in China, which at the
moment all seem to be separate branches
on the tree. As Wragg Sykes puts it, 'until
incredibly recently, the earth was sparkling
with hominins.
ing to get away from?
But that's bollocks. That sense ofremote-
ness, of distance from and hiddenness, are
a side effect of humanity's planetary dom-
ination: the only places where traces of
the deep past remain are places we haven't
built over or crushed underfoot. There
could be Neanderthal remains all around
where l'm writing this, but I live in London
and those traces, if they ever existed, are
long and permanently lost. We find evid-
ence mainly in caves because they're the
only places where remains haven't been
washed away by time and the human pre
sent. This is the same reason the far past
continues to make news: we are construct
ing knowledge from scraps and fragments,
and big new discoveries have the potential
Part of what makes the deep human
past so alluring is the space it allows
for amateur interest and amateur specul
ation. There is so much we don't know
that there are plenty of gaps. Which in turn
means there is plenty of space to dream
and wonder and imagine and -let's face it
- make stuff up. As Rosemary Hill points
out in her wonderful book on Stonehenge,
archaeologists sometimes caim ownership
of the past, but the truth is that it belongs
to all of us - and, as the case of Stonehenge
shows, archaeologists are capable of doing
plenty of damage. (In the case of H. floresicnsis,
Indonesia's leading palaeoanthropologist
tookthe first skeleton away for himself, kept
it for a period of months, and returned it
severely damaged.) I especially like Neo
lithic sites, in which Britain and Ireland are
very rich: I love the sense that by stretching
out our imagination and empathy in time,
we can connect with these people who were
physically and cognitively identical to us,
Our mental image of the Neanderthals
tends to be of lonely, hiding, remote cave
men: hunched figures, similar to us but
stronger and stupider, huddling against the
cold in an icebound Western Europe, wait
ing to become extinct. It's a backdrop of
ice and mammoths. And it's mostly wrong
The hunching - "knuckle-dragging' would
be the cliché - comes from the incorrect
assembly of an early skeleton. Neanderthal
man stood as upright as we do. As for the
cold, which has dominated imagery of
Neanderthals for a long time, Wragg Sykes
sets out the evidence about chronology and
climate to complicate that picture. People
to rewrite the story.
When we think about the Neanderthals,
imagination and empathy are called for,
but science is indispensable. Kindred is a
thrillingly full account of what we currently
know about the Neanderthals. It is Neand-
erthal-centric: Rebecca Wragg Sykes's pro-
ject is to write about Neanderthals as an
end in themselves, not as a failed version of
modern humanity or an evolutionary false
start. She is deeply immersed in the latest
and sea.
Ofall our human relatives, the closest in
both time and genetics, the most compel-
ling, and the best at making news are the
Neanderthals. (l'm using human to refer to
any member of genus Homo. The prefer
red scientific term is 'hominin'. Hominid, a
but who lived so differently.
lf you're having trouble remembering the
sequence of kingdom, phylum, class, order,
archaeology on the topic. At the same time,
don't realise just how long the Neander-
Word perhaps more familiar to the general
family, genus, species, I can recommend the
mnemonic "Kieran, Pease Come Over For Gay
she is an unashamed fan of lean M. Aue,
author of The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) and
thals were around. They were the dominant
human species from 350,000 years ago
reader, is now the tem widely used for all
members ofthe great ape family, Hominidat.
Sex.
How to Give
An Ancient Guide to
Giving and Receiving
Seneca
Selected, translated, and
introduced by James S. Romm
How to Be Content
oou0dod0D000000000000oo
oo000000oes390030g030
An Ancient Poet's Guide
for an Age of Excess
Horace
Selected, translated, and
introduced by Stephen Harrison
HOW TO GIVE
An Aaciee Guide to Gving ond Recadeg
HOW TO
BE CONTENT
An Ancet hrs Gode
wron Age d Ees
Timeless wisdom on generosity and gratitude
from the great Stoic philosopher Seneca
What the Roman poet Horace can teach us
about how to live a life of contentment
PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
This book is a delight...This should be in
the pocket of every lover of Latin literature.
and especially of Horace
-Peter Jones, Classics for All
"With intelligent selections that are translated
with exceptional grace and lucidity, How to
Give presents, for today's readers, Seneca's
thoughts on an issue of perennial interest:
the true nature of generosity and gratitude
and the best ways to behave generously
and gratefully
-Robert A. Kaster, professor emeritus,
Princeton University
"An elegant little volume
-Ron Charles, Washington Post
Horace
Senee
sd, tod od ded y n
00000000000900uuaa900000
d eode
y
0g000000000000900a0ag0ag
3 LONDON REVIEW oF BOOKS 17 DECEMBER 2020