Revisionist and too one-sided

I didn't get bored for a second, and I sincerely appreciate Slimak's warning remarks concerning a over-sapiensising (my (bad) terming, not his) depiction of the Neanderthals which surely has taken place over the last, I'd say, two decades. But I'm still highly sceptical of the author's approach and conclusions.

As I said, he is right in indicating that much of how we see Neanderthals comes from our modern sapiens projections. But he's too one-sided, goes too far. Whereas he criticises the interpretations of other scholars for seeing sapiens behaviour in every shred of evidence, his way of interpreting evidence is just on the other side of the extremes, it's close to nihilism: anything indicating cultural behaviour is being negated, all dates not fitting his conclusions are excluded etc. And that only to relativise some of that nihilism in the concluding remarks, but then with a badly explained interpretation of his own.

Throughout the book, Slimak calls the Neanderthals "the creature"; I find that quite despicable. He's also repeatedly saying that there's "not a shadow of evidence" for Neanderthal art. I believe he's quite alone with this point of view.

This is a revisionist work, trying to take us back to decades fortunately gone when Neanderthals were depicted as stupid sub-humans (he's trying to get away with it by calling them "other", meaning different). Among a lot of further evidence, I personally find it very hard to grasp that sapiens would have mated with "the creature" Slimak characterises as recently as it has according to a variety of genetic analyses (which, of course, he doesn't accept).

I, furthermore, didn't like the author's tendency of self-stylising (also easily detectable in his public photographic portraits), starting with the introduction where he depicts himself as a hard guy traveling through arctic regions and adapting to the cold in no time. He even uses this purely subjective experience, along with the utterly extraordinary example of Wim Hof, as an argument for the adaptiveness of humans and humanoids. I, for one, consist of 3,0 % Neanderthal genes (according to a DNA analysis), and I can assure Mr Slimak that, both, I'm bitterly sensitive to cold and I sweat profusely in heat - without ever adapting, no matter how long the stay.

Overall, this has been an interesting read because it offers a different perspective on current evidence. But, as I said, it's way too tendentious for my taste and some stylistic decisions are questionable.

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