Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life?

When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in smoky caves and loping across the tundra. Their vanishing from the fossil record some 40,000 years ago was a result of competition, along with a little interbreeding, with our own forebears. The story, as I received it then, retained something of the racially hierarchical views at large when the first fossilised bones were recovered in Germany, from near the Neander river, in 1856. Neanderthals were made extinct by an altogether smarter creature. It was inevitable — the clue was in the name: Homo sapiens.

Neanderthals have come a long way since. In the past few decades, there have been more finds in more caves, more bones and stone tools to measure, more middens to pick over, more articulations of skeletons to examine. Relativism has replaced hierarchy as the overall context for interpretation. But perhaps the most striking advance has been in the reach of analytical methods. Genetics, 3D imaging, the use of carbon-14 and strontium isotopes have all helped reveal intricate details of physiognomy and activity (how they sat, what they carried), as well as possible social structures. What it has also done is trigger a landslip of studies and academic papers which have buried any hope of popular understanding.

Deeply involved in these studies herself, Rebecca Wragg Sykes has performed something extraordinary in distilling them into a commanding and wonderfully readable account. Her success is in leaving us with glimpses of real scenes, of imagined individuals and groups going about their daily lives. We are in the realm of archaeo-ethnography rather than speculative fiction (this is not Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear or William Golding’s The Inheritors); her evocations emerge from behind extensive passages of science.