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Sykes combined elegiacal prose with ecstatic reverence, as she explores, unearths and allows us to discover everything about Neanderthals, from their social structures, to their toolmaking capabilities and how the reared their children, the panoply of Neanderthal life is capture within the pages of ‘Kindred�.

Inevitably, given the sheer variety of topics Sykes explores, some readers will be more interested in certain aspects of Neanderthal life than others and whilst I found the detailed descriptions of their toolmaking slightly dry, what was far more interesting was her exploration of their culture and social structures, from their potential rituals around burying their dead, to the likelihood of them cannibalising loved ones they had lost as a mark of remembrance or of the social dynamics which existed as hunter gatherers, much of which echoes the dynamics of human hunter gatherer societies. Indeed a common thread which runs through ‘Kindred� is that Neanderthals are often given a bad rep for being brutish, stupid and violent when they were anything but and many of their behaviours closely resembles humans. Sykes is keen on us seeing the world from outside the lens of egocentricity, but instead wants our perspective to shift to a more symbiotic one, where we see ourselves as being the small part of a greater whole and just another spoke in the wheel of life within which we have existed for such a short space of time.

Like all great scientists, Sykes sees the all of the uncertainty she has to work through as a chance to provide potential answers rather than as wading through the mud and this comes out in the sheer excitement Sykes demonstrates throughout the book as she takes the reader on an unforgettable journey into the lives of our long-lost relatives