The story of humanity's earliest days on earth has come down to us chiefly in the tools and weapons early hominids shaped from flint. With these tools, they gained ascendancy over less dexterous beasts and began the slow conquest of their environment. Other records, including their very bones, have largely rotted away, but their tools of flint endure.

H. Mewhinney presents A Manual for Neanderthals as "a common-sense, down-to-earth study of how flint tools and weapons were made--or for that matter, can still be made by any descendant of Stone Age man."

The author...