Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal

"To make this point, I’m going to bring in a sneaky sixth book: Life As Told By a Sapiens to a Neanderthal . This book is the product of literal dialogues between a hugely well-respected Spanish novelist and writer, Juan José Millás, and a hugely well-respected Spanish paleoanthropologist, Juan Luis Arsuaga, although it’s actually written by Millás. It is a very beautiful, affectionate, funny exploration of his own discoveries, as he talks to this paleoanthropologist, about what it means to be an evolved hominin. Also, it’s about the paleoanthropologist and his personal foibles and drives. It’s very Spanish—there are long conversations over meals with dishes of lovely beans and things like this, and they also go to visit ancient places, museums, even shops. It’s the novelist who is the Neanderthal, so the Homo sapiens here is the paleoanthropologist. Millás is partly joking, but partly philosophical when he’s saying, ‘I feel like I’m a Neanderthal, I feel like I think this way.’ But it’s also about wonder. I think those are the things that really link what science does at its best, and what literature can do for the writer and the reader. There’s a lot of beautiful language in the book, one wonderful line is “ Prehistory lies in the animal that passes by like a shadow.” It’s all telling you that you are part of this massive, deep history of life, and it’s powerfully effective for that. Although it is not like any of the other books, and it’s not a ‘normal’ nonfiction book about Neanderthals either, it engages with those eternal themes that Neanderthals represent for us. * ‘Hominid’ was shifted to mean all Great Apes (including us) and their extinct ancestors, whereas ‘hominin’ covers living humans and their extinct ancestors. However, it’s often used informally to include some species who were likely not directly ancestral to us, but part of the broader Australopithecus and Homo lineages."