Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective

Abstract

Clive Finlayson, 2004, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 255 p. (Hardcover, US $85.00) ISBN: 0-521-82087-1. Ever since the first recognition, back in the pre-evolutionary days of 1856, that Neanderthal Man was a real phenomenon to be contended with and somehow to be explained, paleoanthropologists have enjoyed—if that is the right word—a thoroughly equivocal relationship with this extinct but big-brained human relative. Clearly so close to our own species Homo sapiens , but equally obviously so different, Homo neanderthalensis hovers right at the brink of what we usually think of as humanity. Ought we to see the Neanderthals as no more than a rather strange version of ourselves? Or should we view them as a distinctive evolutionary entity that needs to be understood on its own—and very different—terms? Since the middle of the last century, when paleoanthropology capitulated to the seductive simplicities of the Evolutionary Synthesis (which reduced the evolutionary process to little more than generation-by-generation gene frequency changes within lineages), students of the human fossil record have tended to display a warm-hearted ecumenicism that welcomes the Neanderthals into the embrace of Homo sapiens . For even though they are nowadays a lot more willing than they were a only a decade or two ago to admit just how morphologically distinctive the Neanderthals actually were, most paleoanthropologists remain reluctant to cede these hominids their own independent identity. Clive Finlayson, the erudite and thoughtful author of Neanderthals and Modern Humans, …

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