The book does “a remarkable job synthesizing thousands of academic studies into a single accessible narrative,” the US daily said about it in one of its reviews. But also even compared to later prehistory, we don’t have as much stuff so we have to be even more inventive in pulling out as much information as possible,” Sykes explains during an interview with EL PAÍS via videoconference.įifteen years of studies have been condensed into her book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, which arrived in Spanish bookstores today, September 1 ( Neandertales: la vida, el amor, la muerte y el arte de nuestros primos lejanos, published by Editorial GeoPlaneta), and which The New York Times included on its list of 100 best books of 2020. “We don’t have text, we have no written records. Roman remains were all well and good, but the Pleistocene geological epoch was a much more “exciting” field. Years later, a video shown at the Altamira Cave Museum in northern Spain prompted her to turn her attention to her true passion. “That was when I realized that I wanted to study archeology,” she explains. During a visit organized by her school, Sykes was able to see first-hand the work carried out on a Roman-era archeological site. The relationship between Rebecca Wragg Sykes and the Neanderthals began when she was just 14 years old. The relationship between the Neanderthals and this world was born around 350,000 years ago.

Kindred by rebecca wragg sykes