Updating Neanderthals

Updating the Neanderthals: Understanding Behavioral Complexity in the Late Middle Paleolithic provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of Neanderthals who lived throughout the European and Asian continents. It synthesizes historical information about the study of Middle Paleolithic populations and presents the current debates about their genetics, subsistence, technology, social, and cognitive behaviors. This book is focuses on the last phase of Neanderthal settlements and presents the main patterns of modern humans across Europe. Written by international experts on the Middle Paleolithic who have conducted innovative studies in the last three decades, this book explores the implications of interactions between different human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens. It discusses the diversity and variability of human adaptations and behaviors in the changing climate and environment of the Late Pleistocene, and the relationship between these behaviors, demography, and cognitive capabilities. The book explores theoretical issues and evidences how novel methods have improved our knowledge of human evolution. The complete multidisciplinary approach includes archaeology, paleoecology, genetics, and anthropology, transcending a ‘case study approach’ to present Neanderthals in the most complete way. Updating the Neanderthals: Understanding Behavioral Complexity in the Late Middle Paleolithic is a vital reference for researchers, students, and advanced amateurs in prehistory, archaeology, human evolution studies, evolutionary psychology, paleoecology, and cultural evolution. The only book that offers a comprehensive update on the variability and diversity of Neanderthal behaviors during the Late PleistocenePresents an interdisciplinary reconstruction of Neanderthals by assessing archaeology, paleontology, paleoecology, anthropology, genetics, and cognitionCritically reviews the reliability of archaeological data and the theoretical and methodological advances of the last 30 yearsDiscusses the most debated Neanderthal themes such as demography, diet, socio-economy, and artLed by a team of international editors whose expertise includes Pleistocene human cultural behaviors and adaptations in Europe, innovative methods in the study of Paleolithic paleoecology, and the understanding of Neanderthal skeletal morphology