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Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm Patrick Weiman.

Thanks for joining me.

So back when I was first starting to pay attention to prehistory about a decade ago,

it did not take long for my attention to settle on Neanderthals.

This was around the time that researchers had fully sequenced a Neanderthal genome and

discovered that they had, in fact, interbred with our ancestors.

This was a pretty dang world-shaking insight, had all sorts of implications for how we understand

the basic dynamics of the deep human past and what it means to be human.

But that kind of insight, which we've discussed in some depth here on Tides, is just the

tip of the iceberg.

Our understanding of Neanderthals, our closest cousins, goes far beyond genes and populations.

In recent years and decades, our whole sense of who they were, what they were like, what

they can teach us is all totally shifted.

So to help us understand them better, we've got a wonderful guest joining us here today.

She's an archaeologist and writer, an honorary fellow at the Universities of Liverpool and

Bordeaux, with a deep academic background on Neanderthals.

And she's now written a really wonderful book bringing together decades of specialist

work on our Neanderthal relatives for a popular audience.

It's entitled Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, and I highly recommend

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