Philip Marsden

Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life?

Astonishing finds suggestive of shrine in a subterranean cave in the Aveyron continue to baffle anthropologists, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes

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  • Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

    Rebecca Wragg Sykes

    Bloomsbury Sigma, pp. 400, £20

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.

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