Ludovic Slimak is a Neanderthal researcher of long standing, but despite his scientific credentials, he is anything but sober and cautious. For the great majority of the book, his primary goal seems to be to buttonhole the reader and shout in his ear: “The Neanderthals are different than you and me!” A rather obvious message, you’d think; but he goes further. He swoons over the perception of a Russian researcher who tells him confidently: “Ludovic, they have no soul.” (“I will never be able to thank this researcher enough for saying those words,” sighs the author.) He calls the Neanderthal “A creature a bit like the creature of Frankenstein…unfathomable, since it is hidden in the shadows of the dead, without thoughts, without any words of his own.” This is the Neanderthal to Slimak: a thing, a thing that is in some way conscious, but without a soul. Or so he gives the impression.

In this he’s reminiscient of Descartes, who claimed that animals, being brutes, had no real capacity to suffer, and so enabled hundreds of years of grotesque experimentation on dogs, cats, and apes. At the time that I was born, it was a truism that what separated human beings from the animals was our ability to make tools. After Jane Goodall proved that chimps could make tools (as we’ve since learned that other mammals and birds can also do), the distinguishing feature of human personhood was our use of language. Washoe the chimp, Koko the gorilla, and Alex the African grey parrot are human by that standard. Still, humans keep reaching to find essential differences between us and animals, and they keep failing. Ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. The transmission of culture, defined as localized, learned knowledge, down generations in a family or tribe. All have since been identified in animals. It’s becoming clear that just as there is no single “missing link” between ancestral apes and modern humans, there is no dividing point between the state of being an animal and the state of being a person. There are only continuums.

To be fair, Slimak makes exactly this point at the beginning of chapter four. But Slimak continues his quest to hammer home that the Neanderthals are so different from us as to be essentially different (which is a faith-based claim, since there is no accepted, scientifically measurable distinction between the human and the nonhuman). We see that the Neanderthals honored their dead. So? Chimps grieve, too! Neanderthals adorned themselves. So do birds in New Guinea! It’s all more of an argument for respecting non-human minds than it is for dehumanizing Neanderthals, and it’s unfortunate that he spends so much effort on it, because very near the end of the book, Slimak suddenly softens and makes the point that I would have preferred that he start with.

Put shortly, as a dig archeologist, Slimak believes that there is a dramatic difference in Sapiens tools and Neanderthal tools, and that it has little to do with their quality as tools. “Observation of sapiens technological systems reveals systematic modes of planning and standardization….If we look at a hundred flints…we know the next 100,000 will be exactly the same. We understand instinctively what the maker was trying to do, which is never the case with Neanderthal artifacts….No two [Neanderthal] tools are alike, and that is remarkable. There is no doubt that particular skills were passed on. But this was a culture without normalization, without standardization, without systematic repetition, without that quasi-industrial character....Each Neanderthal tool is a creation in itself. It plays with the natural forms of the material, with the texture of the rock, with its colors, with its touch. There is a balance, an absolute perfection to the object which reveals a remarkable way of seeing the world.” Slimak sees this as “an infinite creativity beyond compare”; a “creativity that is beyond us.” To him, this suggests a fundamentally different, and very non-sapiens, way of looking at and being in the world.

Now, one of the issues I have with Slimak is that he never seems to have an opinion that he doesn’t carry to an extreme. Having praised the superb creativity of the Neanderthal artisan, he has to disparage that of our own: “The artisanal and artistic creations of sapiens are beautiful, but they are beautiful and nothing more...They rarely go any further. For sapiens, art is just an expression and affirmation of ego.” (Tell that to the hundreds of anonymous craftspeople who brought beauty to details that would never be seen, being too high on the spires of European cathedrals to be visible to the ordinary eye!) Still, I think he’s on to something when he says that “in the fields of creativity, sapiens was probably no match…and was in all likelihood intellectually inferior.” Again: badly expressed. Intellect and creativity are like qualities and creativity cannot be measured by intellect. But when I look at the shape of the Neanderthal skull, and I think about what it might mean to have a brain that was, on average, larger than ours but shaped very differently, I imagine a human being who was wise in ways no member of my own species is wise. I can only speculate on how. We will probably never know. And I think this is the essential difference, the mystery, that Slimak is awkwardly trying to preserve. ( )