Cafe Neandertal, by Beebe Bahrami

On page 184 of this book, the author says something that is truly remarkable and delusional: ”Yes, I am a writer, and I find myself quite often trying to get the right words and narrative to get past potential blocks to eliciting direct and vivid experiences. My human mind is wired to allow me to guess at the mind of the reader–something the psychologists call Theory of Mind–and determine what experience the writer might seek. Then, using language, I do my best to conjure it up–which, at a distance, allows me to communicate it directly without us ever meeting in person to share the tale.” The problem with this is that the author does not know how to guess the mind of the reader, because this tale is told completely the wrong way to engage with this reader at least. There is, at least at the core of this book, a work worth reading, in the way that we interpret Neanderthals in a way that is based on our own worldviews and our own perspectives, our hopes and our hears, seeing them as either ominous and brutish and threatening others, as being more suited to living within the constraints of the world rather than seeking to make the world conform to our own imaginations as we do, or as being different from us but equally human, gone but yet a small part of us all the same. Yet despite this, the book is tediously told as the author reveals conversations between herself and others involved in the archaeology of ancient mankind in southern France and Spain, which gives rise to the title of this book, which is more a volume about the mind of researchers and their discussion of their finds than it is about the mute bones of long dead hominins.

This book is a bit short of 300 pages and is divided into twelve chapters. The book begins with an author’s note and then its first chapter discusses seven Neanderthals found in the La Ferrassie cave in what the author labels as a cold case that ends up being somewhat disappointing (1). This is followed by a discussion of food, which happens a lot in this book for some reason (2). After this the author discusses the collegial atmosphere that took place over years of digging with a consistent crowd of diggers and thinkers who spent a lot of time with each other and seemed to greatly enjoyed themselves (3). After this the author reflects on the cosmopolitan identity of the Neanderthals (4), who seemed to vary by regional cultures. The author then discusses her interest in pilgrimages as it relates to religion as well as to archaeology (5). This is followed by a chapter that examines the food that Neanderthals ate, including a surprisingly large number of plants and a few medicinal herbs (6). This is followed by a discussion of hearth fires and the debates over how often Neanderthals enjoyed them (7). After that the author discusses the creative lithic productions of the Neanderthals (8), as well as the way that Neanderthals are so incessantly compared to modern people (9) rather than appreciated on their own terms. This is followed by a discussion of the thorny question of Neanderthal extermination and our blame for it (10), and a look at morphing Neanderthals (11), after which the book ends with acknowledgements.

As is sometimes the case, what would have made this book a lot better is a judicious mix of addition and subtraction. There are times where the author makes startling conclusions, or points out others doing so, like the claim that Neanderthal society was partly patriarchal and partly matriarchal, where the reader desperately wants to know how the person who said this came to the conclusion, but we are not given the chain of logic. One of the few times the author gets this right is when the author draws on her Persian background to talk about the way in which the best Persian poetry seeks to recover its own language and preserve its historical perspective in the face of Arabian domination. Yet this is not entirely relevant given that the Neanderthals were themselves not literate and their way of life and perspective has not survived, only their bones and some of their sites, which have inspired the fantasies of archaeologists and others to fill in the gaps with their own suppositions. More often, though, we see a bunch of overly clubby people talking about their speculations where the author discusses their diet (with occasional references to cannibalism), as well as cringy discussions of the author’s own discussion of the sexiness of a prehistoric version of Javiar Bardem and others who catch her eye. The author should understand as a journalist that people do not care about journalists or thier thoughts, only about good stories they may happen to find. In this book, all too often, the writer makes herself part of the story, and the book is the worse for it.