book review: The Neandertals
Aug. 23rd, 2004 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyTrinkaus, Erik, and Pat Shipman. The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. ISBN 0-394-58900-9.
First off, I have to admit that every paleoanthropological book I read gets measured against the standard of Lucy (Johanson and Edey, 1981), which I read at a young and impressionable age, and which I still count as one of the best popular science books out there. In this case, the comparison is fairly apt, because Trinkaus and Shipman are clearly modelling their work on Johanson and Edey's--which was, perhaps, not the best choice they could have made.
Lucy is in some ways a remarkably chatty book. It provides a lively and frequently irreverent history of paleoanthropology up to the discovery of Lucy herself in 1974, and then talks lovingly and at great length about the process of trying to understand Australopithecus afarensis and fit it, as a species, into the history of human evolution. I don't know how much of the intensely readable style is Johanson and how much is Edey (I was much less impressed with Lucy's Child, which Johanson wrote with a different co-author), but it is definitely a style. Coupled with a well-thought out structure and a absolute willingness to talk about Johanson's own theories, it makes it possible to read Lucy basically at a gulp.
Sadly, The Neandertals does not have a similar assurance. Trinkaus and Shipman seem to want to provide the same sort of chatty history of Neandertal studies as Johanson and Edey do of paleoanthropology, but they founder on an inability to organize their goals. They insist on giving biographies of every scientist mentioned, which means that the narrative has to loop back bewilderingly every time a new player enters the field. And since they likewise insist on moving from country to country as their precis advances, this means a new player enters the field with depressing frequency. It gets incredibly hard to follow, and harder still to care. I'm not a big fan of "human interest" for its own sake, and these biographical excursions fail to rise above (except perhaps for the anecdotes about Eugene Dubois in his later years, keeping his fossils in his house and refusing to allow other scientists to see them). Especially exasperating is the fact that Shipman and Trinkaus choose to refer to Trinkaus himself in the third person, and then laud him with adjectives that take on a false patina of objectivity. (E.g., "Unlike the others [other scholars of his generation], Trinkaus had little interest in the evolutionary fate of the Neandertals; his emphasis was on understanding Neandertals in their own terms. For the first time, Neandertals began to be studied as a species or subspecies with its own behavior, life-style, ecology, and anatomy ... It was a subtle but extremely powerful shift in purpose. ... Trinkaus forged the way for asking, and answering the question: What difference in function, in habitual use, are revealed by the peculiarities of Neandertal anatomy?" (Trinkaus and Shimpan 380). I would much rather have Trinkaus speak directly to the reader, as Johanson does, and make no bones about either his theories or his ego.
What I found most disappointing, though, was that almost the entire book is a history of Neandertal studies, rather than talking about the Neandertals themselves. Only the last chapter talks about the fossils as opposed to the people who found and studied the fossils. And that last chapter doesn't go into serious detail, just offers a kind of broad overview of what scholars thought they knew about Neandertals in 1993.
Ultimately, this book didn't challenge me. And that's a pity.
First off, I have to admit that every paleoanthropological book I read gets measured against the standard of Lucy (Johanson and Edey, 1981), which I read at a young and impressionable age, and which I still count as one of the best popular science books out there. In this case, the comparison is fairly apt, because Trinkaus and Shipman are clearly modelling their work on Johanson and Edey's--which was, perhaps, not the best choice they could have made.
Lucy is in some ways a remarkably chatty book. It provides a lively and frequently irreverent history of paleoanthropology up to the discovery of Lucy herself in 1974, and then talks lovingly and at great length about the process of trying to understand Australopithecus afarensis and fit it, as a species, into the history of human evolution. I don't know how much of the intensely readable style is Johanson and how much is Edey (I was much less impressed with Lucy's Child, which Johanson wrote with a different co-author), but it is definitely a style. Coupled with a well-thought out structure and a absolute willingness to talk about Johanson's own theories, it makes it possible to read Lucy basically at a gulp.
Sadly, The Neandertals does not have a similar assurance. Trinkaus and Shipman seem to want to provide the same sort of chatty history of Neandertal studies as Johanson and Edey do of paleoanthropology, but they founder on an inability to organize their goals. They insist on giving biographies of every scientist mentioned, which means that the narrative has to loop back bewilderingly every time a new player enters the field. And since they likewise insist on moving from country to country as their precis advances, this means a new player enters the field with depressing frequency. It gets incredibly hard to follow, and harder still to care. I'm not a big fan of "human interest" for its own sake, and these biographical excursions fail to rise above (except perhaps for the anecdotes about Eugene Dubois in his later years, keeping his fossils in his house and refusing to allow other scientists to see them). Especially exasperating is the fact that Shipman and Trinkaus choose to refer to Trinkaus himself in the third person, and then laud him with adjectives that take on a false patina of objectivity. (E.g., "Unlike the others [other scholars of his generation], Trinkaus had little interest in the evolutionary fate of the Neandertals; his emphasis was on understanding Neandertals in their own terms. For the first time, Neandertals began to be studied as a species or subspecies with its own behavior, life-style, ecology, and anatomy ... It was a subtle but extremely powerful shift in purpose. ... Trinkaus forged the way for asking, and answering the question: What difference in function, in habitual use, are revealed by the peculiarities of Neandertal anatomy?" (Trinkaus and Shimpan 380). I would much rather have Trinkaus speak directly to the reader, as Johanson does, and make no bones about either his theories or his ego.
What I found most disappointing, though, was that almost the entire book is a history of Neandertal studies, rather than talking about the Neandertals themselves. Only the last chapter talks about the fossils as opposed to the people who found and studied the fossils. And that last chapter doesn't go into serious detail, just offers a kind of broad overview of what scholars thought they knew about Neandertals in 1993.
Ultimately, this book didn't challenge me. And that's a pity.
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 10:35 am (UTC)I like reading history of science books, but this one sound like it would be a bit tedious.
Have you read anything by Tattersall on this? I remember no details whatsoever, but he had a book out back when I was still in grad school on the Neadertals.
re Human Interest
Date: 2004-08-24 05:24 am (UTC)