REVIEW BY MATTHEW POPE
From the start, Slimak is clear that The Naked Neanderthal is a very personal book and offers his own individual views on the archaeology of Neanderthal people. And this is an important point to make. The book is not written with the voice of distant science journalism, nor one of optimistic wonder, nor does it attempt to speak for the discipline as a whole. Rather, Slimak presents us with a view of this now extinct human population that he feels we urgently need to hear.
Slimak lays out his credentials early. A large part of the book is very much a mid-life memoir of more than 30 years of field experience, from the French heartlands of the Palaeolithic discipline to the far north of Siberia. He shares with us some of the hard realities of excavating the remains of distant lives from the caves, crevices, and permafrost landscapes that preserve the Palaeolithic record.
Through more recent excavations and scientific publications, Slimak and his colleagues have already presented the world with a new view of early prehistory in Western Europe. This is one in which multiple waves of Homo sapiens disperse over millennia into Western Europe, bringing with them new technologies. This view sees Homo neanderthalensis and their cultures only replaced by Homo sapiens after a process lasting millennia. This theory, recently echoed in the results of excavations from Castle Ranis in Germany is also significant in distancing Neanderthal populations from the appearance of innovative Upper Palaeolithic technologies in Europe. In this book, Slimak takes his cue from this change in perspective to focus on telling us what separates these two populations, perhaps as a reaction to his perception that for too many years we have focused too much on what unites them.
