![]() Wragg Sykes is a big time Neaderthal-o-phile (apparently captivated in her youth by Jean Auel’s paleo fantasies >). Now nhe story is a lot more complicated, but no less interesting. In the decades since, we’ve learned a lot about ancient humans and Neanderthals. They died out just as the last ice age was ending. There was little reason to assume they couldn’t talk and act just like us. They made tools, buried their dead with ceremony, and generally seem pretty human. ![]() Neanderthals lived beside us for hundreds of thousands of years, across most of Eurasia. Neanderthals were reclassified as Homo sapiens neandertalis (we were then tagged, with no apperant ironic intent, Home sapiens sapiens). In college, I learned more details about the paleontology as known at the time. In science fiction I encountered not the nineteenth century brutal savages, but intelligent civilized Neanderthals, nearly indistinguishable from us, except maybe nicer. ![]() ![]() Neanderthals as our peaceful cousins, wiped out by violent, imperialist H. And, growing up in the second half of the twentieth, I caught the revisionist, anti-racist, wave. I’ve been fascinated by Neanderthals almost as long as I’ve been fascinated by dinosaurs. ![]()
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