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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. This week, John Lancaster is reading his piece on Neanderthals from the Christmas issue of the paper, entitled 20 Types of Human.

It's a review of Kindred, Neanderthal Life,

Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Ragg Sykes.

Our early forebears continue to be very good at getting in the news. In 2003, on the island of Flores in Indonesia, a team of archaeologists investigating the movement of humans from Asia to Australia, found a nearly intact small skeleton

of what turned out to be an entirely new kind of human being, homo-floresiensis. The fact that its body was diminutive

caused it to be immediately given the idiotic nickname Hobbit, because nothing resembles Tolkien's

stolidly Anglo-Agrarians so much as a 50,000-year-old dwarf hominine skeleton from Southeast Asia.

The cutesy nickname also deflected attention from just how consequential this find was,

a new branch on the increasingly complicated family tree of humanity.

In 2008, a team investigating Denisova Cave in Siberia,

named after a former inhabitant,

the 18th century old believer hermit, Dennis,

found bones which, when DNA tested,

turned out to be yet another entirely new branch of human,

Homo Denisova, the Denisovans. More front

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