Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

Book Overview

Neanderthal man has a legendary status. His stocky, hairy, human-like figure, with heavy brow and receding chin, lumbers clumsily around in our collective imagination. But do we know who Neanderthal... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0750919345
• ISBN13: 9780750919340
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Sutton Publishing
• Length: 239 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

What we currently know about human evolution

Why this human specie didn't make it, that was the motivation to learn more about Neanderthal people. This book was of great help, explaining the story we currently know about Neanderthals and also human evolution, using fossil and in some cases mitochondrial DNA found in different places, mostly in Europe and Asia. The life of these people was hard and difficult, they were predators but also prey, and they managed to make it through for ten of thousands of years until Homo Sapiens started to populate Europe. The fossil bones and skulls of these people tell us that they had marked differences with Homo sapiens but we cannot say much about their skin color or whether they interbreed or not with Homo Sapiens (we also don't know the skin color of those too). In my opinion is very strange that a whole race became extinct and probabilities say that some interbreed must have happened, at least providing the fittest Homo Sapiens of some genes, for instance a white skin color. Australian aborigines have very particular characteristics, but those are dissapearing little by little due to the mixture with other races. This book is great to make you think about how difficult has been for human kind to reach up to this point, all the sufferings of people trying to make their best to survive.

A updated book about Neanderthals...

This book has it all, from fossils to DNA tests. Paul Jordan knows his stuff and has the facts all at his finger tips as he takes us on a tour of the world of the Neanderthals AND the history of their discovery. The only complaint I can say is that it is a tad disorganized in format and might confuse people new to the subject. Lots of photos, but few charts or timelines to help the readers. People just beginning might wish to read IN SEARCH OF THE NEANDERTHALS by Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble. Being published in the 1993-4, it is already outdated, but most of the basic information on fossils, camp sites, food sources and stone tools are still valid, aided with maps, charts and timelines. THAN come to Paul Jordan's book for the updated data and ideas.

An outstanding, informative and up-to-date survey.

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.

kissing cousins

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.

kissing cousins

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.