Thomas Wynn - How To Think Like a Neandertal [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: November 24, 2011
There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals--some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours?
In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples of their genes--one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary--words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture--looking at their treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body coloring--and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite.
Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds and culture.

Reviews
"An intriguing look at fellow beings who seem to have been 'inexact mirrors of ourselves'"- Kirkus

"In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick Coolidge provide one of the most rounded portraits yet of a fossil human. The book covers familiar areas - diet, symbolism and language - but also includes innovative assessments of Neanderthals' capacity to tell jokes, and even speculations on what they might have dreamed about."- Clive Gamble, Nature

"Engaging reconstruction of Neandertal life..."- The New York Times

"...How to Think Like a Neandertal is interesting and engaging. Written for a lay audience, it should nonetheless be of great interest to professionals in anthropology, evolutionary biology, and psychology. I also highly recommend it to anyone who wonders what it would have been like to live alongside another intelligent being who shared the designation homo."- PsycCRITIQUES

About the Author
Frederick Coolidge, Professor of Psychology, University of Colorado.
Thomas Wynn, Professor of Archeology, University of Colorado