El sueño del neandertal

Neanderthals have long attracted popular attention. They looked so much like us Homo sapiens, and yet they disappeared. Because? 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 they were not only strong but also that their brains were 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 Neanderthal Dream, Clive Finlayson, whose resume includes having excavated Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, the last known settlement of Neanderthals, explains why we survived and they didn't, in such a novel and both rigorous and fascinating: drawing on elements hitherto unused in this domain, such as the drastic climate changes that hit parts of the world where Neanderthals lived 70,000 years ago, decimating and fragmenting 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.