El sueño del neandertal

Neanderthals have long attracted popular attention. They looked so much like us Homo sapiens, yet they disappeared. Why? The traditional answer is that "we were better", more capable, and that we ended up displacing them to poor quality settlements, or perhaps violently eliminating them. However, it is not clear what happened, among other reasons because it turns out that not only were they strong but their brain was big, even bigger than ours; in fact, they could probably speak and were highly adaptable, characteristics that have usually been attributed exclusively to sapiens. In The Dream of the Neanderthal, Clive Finlayson explains why we survive and they do not, in a way that is as novel and rigorous as it is fascinating: resorting to elements hitherto unused in this domain, such as the drastic climatic changes that hit parts of the world in that Neanderthals lived 70,000 years ago and that decimated and fragmented their world. In reality, Finlayson argues, if we survived it was by a combination of ability and luck: because we were in the right places at the right times.