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berenikeasteria 's review for:
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
by Clive Finlayson
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.