Customer Reviews

Neanderthal

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In Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man And The Story Of Human Origins , Paul Jordan draws upon his archaeological expertise to bring the reader up to date on our current understandings and interpretations of the Neanderthal species and its relationship to homo sapiens. Recently genetic testing on original bones from Germany show that the Neanderthal are not our direct ancestors, but rather a hominid off-shoot from a common ancestor shared with homo sapiens, having diverged from our line of evolution at least half a million years ago and doomed to die out during the last ice age. Jordan also surveys the evidence of about five thousand years of overlapping co-existence with homo sapiens, and some archaeological signs of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthal types. Neanderthal brings together under one cover all the research into the Neanderthal, their world, technology, way of life, death rituals, origins, and relationships to modern man. Ideal for the non-specialist general reader, Neanderthal is enhanced with more than one hundred black and white illustrations and eight pages of color photography. Also highly recommended are Paul Jordan's early works: Early Man; Riddles Of The Sphinx; and Ancestral Images: The Iconography Of Human Origins.

Paul Jordan writes about our close evolutionary cousins in a readable style which is honest and informative without the unfortunate trend by some popular writers on human origins to dumb-it-down. The Neanderthals (FYI pronounced Ny-And-Er-Tals) are presented as a complex and successful (for their time) relative of homo sapiens sapiens, enigmatically similar and yet quite different in many respects. Hardly the dumb, uncaring brutes of popular culture. The book contains detailed, but readable, explanations of the fossil record for (sometimes competing) theories about Neanderthal society, tool making and physiology. Jordan's great strength is his ability to produce a readable narrative while not shying away from admitting the ambiguities that exist. This is Science at its best - a complex and exciting puzzle honestly expounded. My only complaint is the lack of diagrams of time lines showing ice ages and contemporaneous fossil evidence and something of the evolutionary bush (albeit conjectured) of human and near human species.

Paul Jordan writes about our closest cousins in a style which is highly informative without the recent trend by some popular writers on human origins to dumb-it-down. The Neanderthals (FYI pronounced Ny-And-Er-Tals) are presented as a complex and successful (for their time) relative of homo sapiens sapiens, enigmatically similar and yet quite different in many respects. Hardly the dumb, uncaring brutes of popular culture. The book contains detailed, but readable, explanations of the fossil record for (sometimes competing) theories about Neanderthal society, tool making and physiology. Jordan's great strength is his ability to produce a readable narrative while not shying away from admitting the ambiguities that exist. This is Science at its best - a complex and exciting puzzle honestly expounded. My only complaint is the lack of diagrams of time lines showing ice ages and contemporaneous fossil evidence and something of the evolutionary bush (albeit conjectured) of human and near human species.

However an interesting subject, I find a majority sentences entirely too long. At times it becomes cumbersome reading. An anthropological definition of the many unaccustomed words and their usage would help the lay person in reading and understanding the book.