Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

"I have both personal and professional reasons for choosing this. Kindred is an extraordinary book. It really captures the zeitgeist of what is changing in our views of human evolution. We have, for the last 150 years or more, had this idea of cavemen crawling out of the dark into our modern progressive era. These are not really the opinions that anthropologists hold today. That’s not how we see the past—as brutish, nasty Hobbesian lives. Kindred is about our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals—our kissing cousins, if you will. Kindred lyrically and poetically brings out the research that shows us that this was a human species that had a very similar existence to ours and was probably capable of all sorts of creative thoughts and things like that. It really reopens, in a very beautifully written way, the idea of what the past would have looked like when there was more than one human species wandering around, what other types of ways there are to be human. That’s my primary reason for choosing it, because it’s a fantastic, incredibly well-written book. “Anthropology is the study of humans” Also, I have known Rebecca Wragg Sykes for over a decade now, because she works with me on the TrowelBlazers project, which looks at raising the profile of women in the digging sciences. We have worked together on a number of fascinating projects, to try and show how important women’s contributions to our various disciplines have been. I know her as an excellent researcher and her book really blew me away."

"All archaeologists have to do some imagining because the data we work with is partial and fragmentary. We’ve gotten extremely good at squeezing out all different kinds of data from the material that we excavate, and that allows people to specialise. Modern archaeology, whether of Neanderthals and other species or of later prehistory, is fundamentally multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. You have stone tool specialists, you have pollen specialists, you have dating specialists—all different kinds of things. Putting all those different things together gives us a surprisingly rich understanding of Neanderthals. It’s not just me that does that, it happens on every archaeological site, in every publication. Everybody has to work like that. It’s really fun and stimulating to do archaeology, because you do have to have a very broad understanding of many different kinds of data and their possibilities and their limitations. I always like to quote a great prehistorian who taught me during my Master’s at Southampton, Professor Clive Gamble. He had a lovely analogy in one of his books, where you have to tack between the data as if you’re taking a little boat out, and you’re moving between these different ideas, and also, between the scales of data. You can work with nanoscale stuff, in what we call a thin-section (a little slice of sediment that you take and look at through a microscope) where you can see the tiny fragments of bone within the ash of a hearth; and then you can scale up and look at tools or objects, and then you look at the site structure; and then you scale up again and look at how those sites interact, or you look at the genetics of one individual but it also tells you about populations. It’s that movement between materials and scales that makes it difficult but also fun. Yes, very. It is. I never really thought about what I did until I finished the book and people started asking me this sort of question. I realised that, even before I was writing the book, whenever I read a scientific paper, say, an article about the refits between fragments of bone in Abric Romaní (a rock shelter in northern Spain that’s in the book a lot because it’s very rich), you have to physically imagine yourself in the shelter in order to understand the patterning that you are looking at in the figure in that paper. You see the little scatters of things: it’s on a graph, you can see the grid squares where it’s excavated. You might have a plan view looking down, you may also have a vertical slice through, and you see their spatial patterning through the layers. You see that scientific depiction of data, but then you have to turn on your third eye and think, ‘Okay, how does that fit with the wall of the shelter? Where are the hearths? How much space is that? What does that actually look like?’ Also, with a lot of sites like this, it helps to think about the orientation. Where’s the sun coming from? That’s not always obvious from the publication. You do have to end up Googling for things. What is the site orientation? Would the sun be hitting that wall? Where is the drip line (the edge of the rock shelter’s overhang) and how far does that extend out? Is it covering those hearths? What would the bone heaps at the back have looked like, and smelled like, before they rotted down into these little fragments we excavate? “In an evolutionary sense, they are probably the closest relation that we have” I guess I did that without realising that’s what I was doing as a researcher, and then I was able to draw on it more for the book. It was a little bit scary making the decision to let that aspect come out of the shadows, that part of how I think, and to say, ‘Maybe this isn’t something that is just useful for me as a cognitive tool, but perhaps this is something that people might enjoy reading.’ I enjoy it. I enjoy imagining what the reality of those places and spaces and all the sensory stuff would have been like. Even if you can’t necessarily imagine yourself into the mind of a Neanderthal, you can place yourself in their world to some extent, because of the incredible richness of the reconstructed environments and everything that we have, you can do a little bit of time travel. I wanted to try to help people bridge that temporal gap because that’s the big challenge with ancient prehistory. People are very interested in Neanderthals, but they find it a bit intimidating because it seems so distant. Also, the majority of the scientific literature is just not accessible to most people. After writing Kindred , I have received hundreds of wonderful letters and emails. A lot of people have said that they were able to imagine themselves back in the past thanks to my work, and they didn’t expect to have that emotional connection. That was what I was hoping. I have to admit my mind stumbles over the genetics. It’s one of those areas of science where there are slightly contradictory things that exist at the same time in it. What’s funny is that every person I meet who has done these tests will say, ‘Mine said I have more than most other people.’ This is where it gets really complicated. We share a lot of the same DNA with Neanderthals because we come from a common ancestor. Neanderthal-specific things evolved in their own population, just as we evolved our own derived genetic profiles, but we also know that there was interbreeding. That makes it all complex. We know that there was some interbreeding, probably 200,000 years ago—a good few hundred thousand years after those lineages separated. We can think of them as populations, in a similar way that polar bears and brown bears are different species but can interbreed because they separated not very long ago. It’s the same thing. With Neanderthals, we know that there is more than one phase of interbreeding. There’s an early phase around or before 200,000 years ago. Then, we think that there is interbreeding going on after 100,000 years, but in more than one place, and then some of it happens really close to the time at which they disappear as a population (around 40,000 years ago). How do those little extra inputs affect our overall relatedness, in terms of the amount of incoming genetic material in each population, as well as its impact in biological terms? That’s the thing that is really tricky to disentangle, and a lot of the current work in ancient DNA and paleogenomic work is trying to unpick all these questions. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every new sample we get has the potential to rewrite the Neanderthal story. To me, saying that we have about thirty Neanderthal genomes sounds massive, but it’s tiny compared to what we have for living populations of humans and animals, or even people from more recent prehistory. Also, where we get those genomes from, geographically, is quite limited. We can’t extract it from regions that have warmer climates because the DNA degrades over time. We have Neanderthal sites where I am, in Wales, and we’ve got them right through Northern Europe into Western Eurasia. The easternmost site we have is Denisova, in the Altai region. Denisova is a freakily amazing site for DNA preservation because it’s very cold and a bit moist, so they have great stuff. But the Neanderthals also lived southeast of there, in Central Asia, and further towards the Mediterranean coast of Asia as well, in Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Israel, all those areas. We don’t have any DNA from there. Everyone would like it, not just because it’s another region where they lived—and they lived slightly different lifestyles there, so you also have the potential for different genetic subpopulations—but also, those regions are where we know the dispersals of early Homo sapiens were moving outwards from Africa. Those are the places we would expect the highest levels of contact and interbreeding to happen, and we would like to be able to look at that genetically, but we can’t yet. As you say, people made jokes about this for a long time, as well as the general thing of calling people Neanderthals, as a cultural jibe. Where we are now with the DNA, we can look at the presence of Neanderthal DNA across populations. We generally use the big DNA databases, which have a slight bent towards medical, biological or pathological stuff because that’s the data that gets recorded. What we can see is that in some cases, people who have higher levels of Neanderthal DNA relating to particular parts of the genome may tend to have a slightly different head shape or face shape, but we can’t home in on the precise details yet. It does look like maybe some elements of people’s physical characteristics, in a broad sense, are predictable on a population scale. Yes, exactly. I’m sure things are going to move closer to that. Also, as we gain a better understanding of what the Neanderthal versions are doing, how they affect the development of cells or bodily structures. That, in itself, is also slightly tricky because all we can do there is ‘neanderify’ a cell, and then (we’ve done this with brain neurons) you can see that they do develop a slightly different structure or different levels of interactions, but you’re doing that outside of a Neanderthal bodily ecosystem, and there are all kinds of complexities in how living genomes work as a whole, so it’s only a very small part of what the reality in the past would have been like. This is one of the other things that we understand now about our own bodies. You have the whole science of epigenetics, and the way that the environment or adverse experiences interact within the body itself, and can affect the expression of genes. So you may have a genome that is a bit like a recipe, but the kitchen you cook it in is going to affect that. In a sense, we are probably never really going to know some of the details of what those things meant for Neanderthals, but we can get a good idea of some of it. For example, did Neanderthal brains develop differently at a cellular level? It does look like they did. They’re not only a different shape as organs inside the skulls, but they grew differently as well. However, we are quite far away from being able to understand, if ever, what that meant for how they thought. Things like that are always going to be tricky because our own brains are so plastic. You start off with an infant’s brain, and that infant’s life trajectory can drastically affect the potential for what is going to happen to them and how they think and feel and develop. I didn’t want to include lots of books that are slightly like mine, ones that bring together the scientific research. I was more interested in books which point to how we might think about Neanderthals. That’s what I thought might be fun for people."