Forty thousand years too late, Neanderthals are finally getting a chance to stand erectus and take a bow. Apparently, our unibrowed cousins weren’t dumb jerks like your brother-in-law, dragging their hairy knuckles across the den. Not at all.
According to “Kindred” (2020), a fascinating book by archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Neanderthals used tools, made clothes and may have told stories and honored their dead. “They were state-of-the-art humans,” Sykes writes, “just of a different sort.” In the 19th century, it felt easy to look down on these genetic neighbors of a different sort.
After all, as the result of prehistory’s greatest mano-a-mano ish battle, we won the deed to planet Earth. But in the early 21st century, Homo sapiens have lost their swagger. For all the wonders of modern culture – driverless cars, CRISPR, Taylor Swift – many of us fear we’re on the cusp of burning ourselves up.
Courtesy of Scribner “Creation Lake” By Rachel Kushner Scribner. 407 pages. $29.
99 Could the humble Neanderthals, who still lurk in our DNA, hold the secret to a better life? For Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” that question is the woolly mammoth in the room. Since her 2008 debut, “Telex from Cuba,” Kushner has proved to be one of America’s most intellectually curious novelists, capable of interrogating radical political and cultural ideas in strikingly original plots. Her terrific 2013 novel, “The Flamethrowers,” roared through th.