Website alert: A news item, Face of 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman revealed, alerted me to a BBC documentary. If you subscribe to Netlfix and are interested in how paleo-archeologists work, it is well worth watching. I loved a reenactment near the end in which a fearful young Neanderthal woman in need of help approaches an equally wary group of Homo sapiens. Instead of the expected story of violence, it shows how the two species could have interacted peacefully—a happier thought than abduction and rape as the source of the Neanderthal DNA in most of us! A shortcut to the findings is a summary article at Science Direct: Archaeologists unveil face of Neanderthal woman.
Adrie and Alfons Kanriss, who created the model head of the older Neanderthal woman shown here, are twin brothers in the Netherlands who specialize in such reconstructions. They could in themselves spark an idea for fiction!
And speaking of fiction—for a long, thoughtful interview about four novels and a work of non-fiction, check out Five Books Imagining Neanderthals recommended by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. I have already heartily endorsed her own book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art as well as one of her picks, The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron. I'm glad to have more of her recommendations to my To-Read list.