The prominent bony brows, Virchow opined, were the result of excessive frowning from his chronic pain. Disease, Virchow said, explained the skeleton’s many peculiarities: the Cossack’s bowed limbs resulted from decades in the saddle, and he must have suffered from arthritis, rickets, and a broken leg. Legend has it that Virchow chose sausages as the weapon, one of which was loaded with parasites: Bismarck declined.Īfter detailed examination, Virchow proclaimed the bones to be the remains of a lost Russian Cossack who had somehow wandered to Düsseldorf and secreted himself in a cave, where he died. Not only was he a medical pioneer, publishing two thousand research papers and earning himself the epithet “the father of pathology,” but he was also a revolutionary who manned the barricades in Berlin in 1848, a lifelong campaigner for social reform and sanitation, and a progressive parliamentarian so hated by Otto von Bismarck that the Prussian military leader challenged him to a duel. Virchow was one of those academics who make the current generation seem Lilliputian. Sixteen years after the first fossils of Neanderthals were discovered by quarry workers in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf in 1856, the bones were sent to the famous anatomist Rudolf Virchow.

Thankfully, Wragg Sykes does name some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century researchers, and her accounts of these pioneers make for entertaining reading. Surprisingly, on the first page Wragg Sykes informs us that she will not introduce us to the scholars who have worked in the field over the past ninety years, because “there simply wasn’t the space to mention the names and affiliations of researchers for every site or piece of information.” To my astonishment, the book is also entirely unreferenced. Kindred by the archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a dense work, packed with information and interpretations that strongly challenge earlier conceptions of Neanderthals. This transformation has been driven partly by new discoveries in archaeology, some of which are truly astonishing, but also by changing societal attitudes about how we depict others. But over the past few years the Neanderthals of our imaginations have evolved marvelously, so that recent images closely resemble us (the Neanderthal woman in the Museum of the Confluences, Nice, with her direct gaze, is a prime example). If you visit an even moderately old museum display on human evolution, or open anything but the latest textbooks on the subject, you’ll encounter cave-dwelling, mammoth-hunting Neanderthals who are beetle-browed, stooped, and distinctly unintelligent-looking. A model of a Neanderthal male in his twenties on display at the Natural History Museum, London, 2014

Kindred neanderthal book review