Thankfully, Wragg Sykes does name some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century researchers, and her accounts of these pioneers make for entertaining reading. Surprisingly, on the first page Wragg Sykes informs us that she will not introduce us to the scholars who have worked in the field over the past ninety years, because “there simply wasn’t the space to mention the names and affiliations of researchers for every site or piece of information.” To my astonishment, the book is also entirely unreferenced. Kindred by the archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a dense work, packed with information and interpretations that strongly challenge earlier conceptions of Neanderthals. This transformation has been driven partly by new discoveries in archaeology, some of which are truly astonishing, but also by changing societal attitudes about how we depict others.

But over the past few years the Neanderthals of our imaginations have evolved marvelously, so that recent images closely resemble us (the Neanderthal woman in the Museum of the Confluences, Nice, with her direct gaze, is a prime example). If you visit an even moderately old museum display on human evolution, or open anything but the latest textbooks on the subject, you’ll encounter cave-dwelling, mammoth-hunting Neanderthals who are beetle-browed, stooped, and distinctly unintelligent-looking. A model of a Neanderthal male in his twenties on display at the Natural History Museum, London, 2014

Kindred book neanderthal