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16 reviews for:
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
Clive Finlayson
3.46 AVERAGE
16 reviews for:
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
Clive Finlayson
3.46 AVERAGE
Interesting but oddly I would have liked to read more about Neanderthals and less about what Finlayson calls the Ancestors. But Finlayson does have a great grasp on the ecology.
Maybe this book was just a mismatch between what I was actually looking for and the actual content, but I just never got on board with this one. The title, cover, and back cover blurb led me to believe that the subject matter would be about the Neanderthals, and on top of that I had been led to Clive Finlayson’s book through reading Alice Roberts’ popular history The Incredible Human Journey, in which Clive’s work on Neanderthal sites in Gibraltar features. However, when I got into it, the Neanderthals featured only in passing, whilst the main topic of discussion was climate change and palaeoenvironments, against which is set the much wider story of human evolution. This was not what I had been expecting exactly, but I gamely stuck with it. Unfortunately I encountered a few problems along the way.
Firstly the material is delivered in a pretty dry manner, and the book is chock full of details – I began to find it a struggle to keep my interest up, especially since I tend to find palaeoenvironments a rather dry topic at the best of times. The specific information covered and the style of delivery seemed like it was geared towards pre-existing subject specialists.
Secondly, for some reason inexplicable to me, Finlayson insisted upon referring to one particular group of humans as "the Ancestors" instead of more familiar terms. This confused me enormously and I was never clear on whether he was referring to anatomically modern Homo sapiens that lived in the Palaeolithic, some anatomically modern group but more robust in appearance as opposed to latter day gracile forms, or some pre-Homo sapiens species that may have been a direct antecedent, such as the theoretically African equivalents of Homo heidelbergensis. Finlayson put forwards some interesting environmental perspectives – such as the notion that Out of Africa is too simplistic a model and in fact Homo sapiens and prior Homo genuses had made the journey many times before simply as a response to moving with an expanding advantageous environmental band as certain climate conditions prevailed. I was most definitely piqued by the idea, but wondered where the evidence was for this.
Thirdly, I don’t know why but, like another reviewer, for some reason it was uncomfortable reading when Finlayson laid into colleagues. He seemed to be trying to make a point about how shoddy and unsupportable certain conclusions were on the basis of little evidence, but it kind of felt... superior. In fact, the whole book felt like it was labouring under the premise that the readership is possessed of a kind of latter day colonialist attitude about the superiority of Homo sapiens and has an impression of Neanderthals as little better than grunting apes, and as a result there’s a consistent ambiance of superiority of its own, of almost delight in attempting to knock down this assumed reader stance. Even the back cover blurb reads:
Um... no, her appearance doesn’t come as a shock to me. The depiction of Neanderthal man as a knuckle-dragging troglodyte is decades out of date, and vastly inaccurate, as I know, and I imagine as would anyone else picking up a book on this topic – unless a complete layman happened to pick this up first time, but as I mentioned earlier, the specialist nature of this book and the depth of the material is really not geared towards a layman readership. And no, the appearance of the Neanderthal woman does not erode my sense of uniqueness. Neanderthals were a distinctly separate branch of the Homo genus, and even within Homo sapiens, we’re all different as individuals. One can have no assumptions of superiority but still recognise that each and every being is unique. I may have read this ambiance into the book, but that's just what it felt like. Finlayson stresses that the survival and success of Homo sapiens was down to chance, and as a strong believer in chance happenings and as an historian and archaeologist I have to agree that this has been the case many many times throughout history, but I would be cautious about asserting that it was entirely due to chance, as Finlayson appears to - surely the impetus for evolution itself is to exploit advantageous traits that would promote success of the species, or rather, to randomly mutate and then advantageous traits tend to survive for their usefulness.
By Chapter Three I was skimming, and when it didn’t get any better at holding my interest, I hurriedly skimmed to the end just to get through the thing. Some additional points; Finlayson suggests that the chronology was such that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may never have encountered each other, or only, at most, for a couple of thousand years of overlap, and he also concludes from the evidence that interbreeding did not take place, or at least in such a small degree that it is not detectable – pity for Finlayson that less than two years after his book came out interbreeding has been proven by a genetic contribution of up to 4%. Finlayson argues that the lack of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens contact implies that Neanderthals were successfully keeping Homo sapiens out of Europe and that Homo sapiens could only move in when the Neanderthals began to go extinct due to climate change. Whilst I, like Finlayson, doubt the idea that Homo sapiens in conflict with Neanderthals were the (sole) cause of Neanderthal extinction, and the idea of climate change having an impact on the Neanderthals does sound plausible to me, I think, especially given recent discoveries, that the Neanderthals did not keep Homo sapiens out of Europe and that there was more contact than Finlayson suggests.
I’m not sure who I would recommend this book to. On the one hand it’s so dry and specialist in its concerns that it really feels like it’s aimed at existing specialists. Finlayson does come up with a some interesting points that are worth noticing, such as his ideas about the expansion of environment bands leading to a more complex course of events than simply multiple Out of Africas, and the point that changes in the environment likely were one of the contributing factors to the disappearance of the Neanderthals. But I felt that other ideas that he presents were ones I just couldn't credit, personally. Perhaps a specialist would be able to make more sense of it than I, but I do stand by my criticism that the book seems to assume its readers’ anti-Neanderthal bias when in fact my attitude going into the book was one of curiosity and fascination with Neanderthals.
5 out of 10.
Firstly the material is delivered in a pretty dry manner, and the book is chock full of details – I began to find it a struggle to keep my interest up, especially since I tend to find palaeoenvironments a rather dry topic at the best of times. The specific information covered and the style of delivery seemed like it was geared towards pre-existing subject specialists.
Secondly, for some reason inexplicable to me, Finlayson insisted upon referring to one particular group of humans as "the Ancestors" instead of more familiar terms. This confused me enormously and I was never clear on whether he was referring to anatomically modern Homo sapiens that lived in the Palaeolithic, some anatomically modern group but more robust in appearance as opposed to latter day gracile forms, or some pre-Homo sapiens species that may have been a direct antecedent, such as the theoretically African equivalents of Homo heidelbergensis. Finlayson put forwards some interesting environmental perspectives – such as the notion that Out of Africa is too simplistic a model and in fact Homo sapiens and prior Homo genuses had made the journey many times before simply as a response to moving with an expanding advantageous environmental band as certain climate conditions prevailed. I was most definitely piqued by the idea, but wondered where the evidence was for this.
Thirdly, I don’t know why but, like another reviewer, for some reason it was uncomfortable reading when Finlayson laid into colleagues. He seemed to be trying to make a point about how shoddy and unsupportable certain conclusions were on the basis of little evidence, but it kind of felt... superior. In fact, the whole book felt like it was labouring under the premise that the readership is possessed of a kind of latter day colonialist attitude about the superiority of Homo sapiens and has an impression of Neanderthals as little better than grunting apes, and as a result there’s a consistent ambiance of superiority of its own, of almost delight in attempting to knock down this assumed reader stance. Even the back cover blurb reads:
"On the front cover of this book is the reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman. Doesn’t she look human? Perhaps her strikingly human appearance comes as something of a shock. It erodes our assumptions of uniqueness."
Um... no, her appearance doesn’t come as a shock to me. The depiction of Neanderthal man as a knuckle-dragging troglodyte is decades out of date, and vastly inaccurate, as I know, and I imagine as would anyone else picking up a book on this topic – unless a complete layman happened to pick this up first time, but as I mentioned earlier, the specialist nature of this book and the depth of the material is really not geared towards a layman readership. And no, the appearance of the Neanderthal woman does not erode my sense of uniqueness. Neanderthals were a distinctly separate branch of the Homo genus, and even within Homo sapiens, we’re all different as individuals. One can have no assumptions of superiority but still recognise that each and every being is unique. I may have read this ambiance into the book, but that's just what it felt like. Finlayson stresses that the survival and success of Homo sapiens was down to chance, and as a strong believer in chance happenings and as an historian and archaeologist I have to agree that this has been the case many many times throughout history, but I would be cautious about asserting that it was entirely due to chance, as Finlayson appears to - surely the impetus for evolution itself is to exploit advantageous traits that would promote success of the species, or rather, to randomly mutate and then advantageous traits tend to survive for their usefulness.
By Chapter Three I was skimming, and when it didn’t get any better at holding my interest, I hurriedly skimmed to the end just to get through the thing. Some additional points; Finlayson suggests that the chronology was such that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may never have encountered each other, or only, at most, for a couple of thousand years of overlap, and he also concludes from the evidence that interbreeding did not take place, or at least in such a small degree that it is not detectable – pity for Finlayson that less than two years after his book came out interbreeding has been proven by a genetic contribution of up to 4%. Finlayson argues that the lack of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens contact implies that Neanderthals were successfully keeping Homo sapiens out of Europe and that Homo sapiens could only move in when the Neanderthals began to go extinct due to climate change. Whilst I, like Finlayson, doubt the idea that Homo sapiens in conflict with Neanderthals were the (sole) cause of Neanderthal extinction, and the idea of climate change having an impact on the Neanderthals does sound plausible to me, I think, especially given recent discoveries, that the Neanderthals did not keep Homo sapiens out of Europe and that there was more contact than Finlayson suggests.
I’m not sure who I would recommend this book to. On the one hand it’s so dry and specialist in its concerns that it really feels like it’s aimed at existing specialists. Finlayson does come up with a some interesting points that are worth noticing, such as his ideas about the expansion of environment bands leading to a more complex course of events than simply multiple Out of Africas, and the point that changes in the environment likely were one of the contributing factors to the disappearance of the Neanderthals. But I felt that other ideas that he presents were ones I just couldn't credit, personally. Perhaps a specialist would be able to make more sense of it than I, but I do stand by my criticism that the book seems to assume its readers’ anti-Neanderthal bias when in fact my attitude going into the book was one of curiosity and fascination with Neanderthals.
5 out of 10.
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis may be the title character, but his role is relatively supportive to Finlayson’s descriptively detailed narrative of human evolution. And it’s not so much ‘how’ humans evolved as it is ‘where’ they evolved, ‘when’ they evolved, and ‘why’ all that matters.
Let us forget the rather grandiose conceptualizations of our ancestral Out-Of-Africa exodus. We are an invasive rather than a migratory species. Finlayson frequently uses the Eurasian collared dove, another invasive species, as an analogy:
“…the collared doves settled in suitable areas in south-eastern Europe… Their offspring could not stay where the parents lived, so they moved a kilometer or two down the road to the next park. Like this, kilometer by kilometer, the birds got across Europe… There was no migration of collared doves; it was simply a demographically triggered geographical expansion.”
From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:
“…there was nothing particularly special about human geographical expansion in prehistory, and it most certainly was not a migration of peoples.”
Kudos to the author for equating hominid expansion to something as visually aesthetic as the collared dove. Personally, I would have opted for something less adorable like Australia’s cane toad or the brown tree snakes of Guam.
As it turns out, Finlayson is full of interesting and thought provoking ideas. Take for instance his theory on bipedalism:
“Orangutans share something with humans that gorillas and chimpanzees do not. All of them can stand upright but when chimpanzees and gorillas do so, the hind limbs are flexed. Orangutans and humans, on the other hand, stand on straight hind limbs. This way of walking on tree branches gives the orangutan great benefits.”
From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:
“…the old idea that walking on two feet started when our ancestors ventured away from the forest into the open savannahs no longer holds. It now looks likely that bipedal walking may have started on the trees themselves.”
It’s not that the author’s ideas are without merit. Quite the opposite. His theories are exceptional and plausible and intriguing. It is his leap-of-faith logic of progression that saps away some of his credence.
Where were we? Oh yes, I remember - the plight of the Neanderthals:
[SPOILER ALERT] It turns out that Finlayson’s hypothesis on the extinction of the Neanderthals is perhaps the least controversial thing in his book. He attributes their disappearance to a combination of factors, the least of which is the encroachment of modern humans. In his analysis, what little interbreeding there was between Neanderthals and so-called ‘modern humans’ was incidental and inconsequential. It was climate change, their calorie-dependent physical build, their proclivity for ambush hunting and ambush hunting technology, and an unhealthy dose of sheer bad luck that did them in. From what paleoanthropologists can discern from the fossil record, Neanderthal populations were declining before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. Their demise might have been accelerated by the competition and encroachment, but their fate was already sealed.
“Irrespective of the position that we might take regarding the causes of the extinction of the Neanderthals, it is undeniable that by the time the Ancestors reached their strongholds in southern Europe and Asia these ancient peoples of Eurasia were already on the way out.”
Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of The Humans Who Went Extinct. It reads as Finlayson venting a little steam and is probably my favorite passage in the whole book:
“[The Agricultural Revolution] marked the start of the illusion of progress towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has turned into a nightmare as we procrastinate today while the current state and the future of our planet hang in the balance as a result of our voracity. How could we have reached such an unhealthy state of affairs? The answer lies in the way in which we got to the present, not as evolutionary superstars but as pests that invaded every nook and cranny that became available.”
3.5 stars, rounded up
Let us forget the rather grandiose conceptualizations of our ancestral Out-Of-Africa exodus. We are an invasive rather than a migratory species. Finlayson frequently uses the Eurasian collared dove, another invasive species, as an analogy:
“…the collared doves settled in suitable areas in south-eastern Europe… Their offspring could not stay where the parents lived, so they moved a kilometer or two down the road to the next park. Like this, kilometer by kilometer, the birds got across Europe… There was no migration of collared doves; it was simply a demographically triggered geographical expansion.”
From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:
“…there was nothing particularly special about human geographical expansion in prehistory, and it most certainly was not a migration of peoples.”
Kudos to the author for equating hominid expansion to something as visually aesthetic as the collared dove. Personally, I would have opted for something less adorable like Australia’s cane toad or the brown tree snakes of Guam.
As it turns out, Finlayson is full of interesting and thought provoking ideas. Take for instance his theory on bipedalism:
“Orangutans share something with humans that gorillas and chimpanzees do not. All of them can stand upright but when chimpanzees and gorillas do so, the hind limbs are flexed. Orangutans and humans, on the other hand, stand on straight hind limbs. This way of walking on tree branches gives the orangutan great benefits.”
From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:
“…the old idea that walking on two feet started when our ancestors ventured away from the forest into the open savannahs no longer holds. It now looks likely that bipedal walking may have started on the trees themselves.”
It’s not that the author’s ideas are without merit. Quite the opposite. His theories are exceptional and plausible and intriguing. It is his leap-of-faith logic of progression that saps away some of his credence.
Where were we? Oh yes, I remember - the plight of the Neanderthals:
[SPOILER ALERT] It turns out that Finlayson’s hypothesis on the extinction of the Neanderthals is perhaps the least controversial thing in his book. He attributes their disappearance to a combination of factors, the least of which is the encroachment of modern humans. In his analysis, what little interbreeding there was between Neanderthals and so-called ‘modern humans’ was incidental and inconsequential. It was climate change, their calorie-dependent physical build, their proclivity for ambush hunting and ambush hunting technology, and an unhealthy dose of sheer bad luck that did them in. From what paleoanthropologists can discern from the fossil record, Neanderthal populations were declining before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. Their demise might have been accelerated by the competition and encroachment, but their fate was already sealed.
“Irrespective of the position that we might take regarding the causes of the extinction of the Neanderthals, it is undeniable that by the time the Ancestors reached their strongholds in southern Europe and Asia these ancient peoples of Eurasia were already on the way out.”
Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of The Humans Who Went Extinct. It reads as Finlayson venting a little steam and is probably my favorite passage in the whole book:
“[The Agricultural Revolution] marked the start of the illusion of progress towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has turned into a nightmare as we procrastinate today while the current state and the future of our planet hang in the balance as a result of our voracity. How could we have reached such an unhealthy state of affairs? The answer lies in the way in which we got to the present, not as evolutionary superstars but as pests that invaded every nook and cranny that became available.”
3.5 stars, rounded up
Lots of good info. A little slow in places, but still interesting. Apparently it's all down to luck, which is kinda obvious if you think about it.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
This book addresses the question of why the neanderthals died out while homo sapiens survived. It rejects the genetic superiority of the later and is scathing on the thesis that homo sapiens played a causal role in the extinction of the neanderthals. Instead, Finlayson argues that the main culprit was the cooling climate. Moreover, he argues that this development disproportionately affected the somewhat more successful neanderthals because they were more used to one way of life, rather than the more marginal and thus more innovative homo sapiens. The analogy he offers is a study in Gibraltar that found that rich families suffered less from diseases from poor water. But when there was a drought and everyone had to drink dirty water the poor survived (because they were resistant) while the rich suffered comparatively more.
It is a somewhat interesting thesis, although marred by the suspicion that one politically motivated narrative (conquest by the superior homo sapiens) is just being replaced with another (climate change combined with a form of moral relativism). The evidence for the later seems thin, especially given the many large climatic changes that took place over the approximately 500,000 years since homo sapiens and neanderthals split off from each other.
As for the writing, two complaints: (1) the author is prone to grandiose statements about how this book differs from the previous literature (e.g., he finds the rejection of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis particularly important, even though he just replaces it with the observation that the eurasian zone was geographically and climatically contiguous with Africa). (2) the first third/half of the book is an uninspired retelling of evolution through about 50,000 years ago.
All of this aside, Finlayson hits his stride in the second half of the book when he focuses on the period from 50,000 years ago (when neanderthals were in Europe but homo sapiens were not) to 10,000 years ago (the end of the last ice age and the invention of agriculture). This is presented with a reasonable amount of detail and grounding in the original scholarly material, to which Finlayson is a contributor.
It is a somewhat interesting thesis, although marred by the suspicion that one politically motivated narrative (conquest by the superior homo sapiens) is just being replaced with another (climate change combined with a form of moral relativism). The evidence for the later seems thin, especially given the many large climatic changes that took place over the approximately 500,000 years since homo sapiens and neanderthals split off from each other.
As for the writing, two complaints: (1) the author is prone to grandiose statements about how this book differs from the previous literature (e.g., he finds the rejection of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis particularly important, even though he just replaces it with the observation that the eurasian zone was geographically and climatically contiguous with Africa). (2) the first third/half of the book is an uninspired retelling of evolution through about 50,000 years ago.
All of this aside, Finlayson hits his stride in the second half of the book when he focuses on the period from 50,000 years ago (when neanderthals were in Europe but homo sapiens were not) to 10,000 years ago (the end of the last ice age and the invention of agriculture). This is presented with a reasonable amount of detail and grounding in the original scholarly material, to which Finlayson is a contributor.