Solid popular science.
Everything you ever wanted to know about our closest relative.
Wragg Sykes has made a career studying Neanderthals, and she skillfully lays out a massive amount of information, much of which has turned up over the past few decades. Although not the first, the Neanderthal bones unearthed by German miners in 1856 were the first recognized as different from modern humans. Since some experts insisted that these were simply a contemporary with bone disease, serious study only began at the end of the century after more discoveries. Despite countless popular portrayals, the average Neanderthal was not a hunchbacked caveman: “Somewhat shorter than average,” writes the author, “with broader chests and little waists, their limb proportions were also slightly different. Beneath massively muscled thighs were thicker, rounder and slightly curved leg bones…unlike countless inaccurate reconstructions they absolutely walked as upright as us.” Dressed properly and passing on a city street, a Neanderthal would attract no attention. Appearing in Europe about 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals possessed impressive hunting skills, a complex social life, and technology as advanced as modern Homo sapiens, who arrived about 50,000 years ago and drove them to extinction 10,000 years ago—for reasons about which Wragg Sykes and her colleagues continue to speculate. Early field researchers carried off bones and tools and discarded everything else. Modern scientists return to old sites and carefully sift through tons of dirt to retrieve bits of vegetation, chemicals, bone fragments, microfossils, pollen, and trash. High-tech scanners and computers pour out a stream of revelations. Scientists scrape plaque from old teeth, put it under the microscope, and learn what they ate, the parasites they harbored, the tools they built, and the smoke they breathed. Many chapters, including 35 pages on the Neanderthal diet, reveal almost too much, but Wragg Sykes clearly loves her subject, so educated readers will have no trouble absorbing the spectacular revelations of modern anthropology.
Solid popular science.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4729-3749-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
HISTORY | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ANCIENT | WORLD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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