To one nineteenth-century scholar, their fierce, ridged brows were evidence of a "moral darkness" that set them irrevocably apart from human beings. Some commentators accused them of cannibalism. Yet by the 1970s the Neandertals were being hailed as "the first flower people" and praised for their apparent compassion and religious piety.
The story of how scientists could come to such divergent conclusions about a set of bones unearthed in Germany in 1856 unfolds with irresistible detail in this enthralling book. Even as The Neandertals assesses the identity, kinship, and character of our...

In 1856, as Darwin completed "The Origin of Species", the fossilized remains of a stocky human-like creature were discovered in a cave in the German Neander Valley. This work offers the complete story of Neanderthal Man, dead for 40,000 years, about whom c

This is primary descriptive volume on the most important paleontological site for research into the emergence of humans, the development of a modern pattern of hunting and gathering societies in the Middle Upper Paleolithic Era. Erik Trinkhaus is among the most distinguished paleoanthropologists and a member of the National Academy. Svoboda is the project leader on the Pavlovian site.

To most 19th-century scholars, the Neandertals' fierce, ridged brows were evidence of a moral darkness that set them apart from humans. Yet by the 1970s, the Neandertals were being praised for their apparent compassion. This work reveals how different scientists came to such wildly divergent conclusions. Photos and illustrations.

The Pestera cu Oase is a sealed limestone cavern in southwestern Romania which served principally as a hibernation den for Pleistocene cave bears and wolves, but also contained the fossil remains of the earliest modern humans in Europe. Currently inaccessible except through cave diving and rock climbing, the cave preserved its contents undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. To understand the cave, its contents, the bear and wolves, and especially the humans, an international team mapped and excavated the Pestera cu Oase from 2002 to 2005, and has since analyzed its remains in detail. The...

In this latest volume in the Human Evolution Series, Erik Trinkaus and his co-authors synthesize the research and findings concerning the human remains found at the Sunghir archaeological site. It has long been apparent to those in the field of paleoanthropology that the human fossil remains from the site of Sunghir are an important part of the human paleoanthropological record, and that these fossil remains have the potential to provide substantial data and inferences concerning human biology and behavior, both during the earlier Upper Paleolithic and concerning the early phases of human...

The Neandertal site at Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, located in Murcia in southeastern Spain, is unique in several respects. Its most important contribution to the field of study, however, may be the fact that it consists of the remains of multiple individuals, adding appreciable breadth to the available data for a greater understanding of Neandertals. Further, its location in the Iberian Peninsula south of the Pyrenees suggests potential for studying a population that may have been somewhat isolated from contemporaneous groups of early humans.
This comprehensive analysis...