Rebecca Wragg Sykes in Nature:
Will we ever truly understand the Neanderthals? Archaeologist Ludovic Slimak paints a vivid picture in The Naked Neanderthal. Written like a philosophical travelogue, this intriguing book offers personal vignettes of archaeological excavations and provocative critiques of researchers’ tendencies to interpret Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) as the intellectual and creative cousins of Homo sapiens. Instead, the author argues, they are stranger to us than people might admit, with a culture that is both sophisticated and alien.
Neanderthals emerged between 400,000 and 350,000 years ago and roamed western Eurasia, before disappearing around 40,000 years ago. Rather than concentrating on the ice-age periods that tend to get popular attention, Slimak draws readers’ eyes to the Eemian interglacial — a warm phase of more than 10,000 years that began around 123,000 years ago, when much of the Neanderthals’ Eurasian territory was richly forested.
More here.