BOOK REVIEW / Looking for the wild man in all of us: 'In Search of the Neanderthals' - Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble: Thames & Hudson, 18.95 pounds

DID YOU see a Neanderthal when you looked in the mirror this morning? According to one school of thought, you probably did - if you are of European stock, at any rate. According to another, the only people who have seen Neanderthals are those who live in far-flung quarters of central Asia where 'wild men' are occasionally spotted. The idea that Neanderthals survive as cousins of the abominable snowman belongs to the fringe; the argument that Neanderthal genes live on in modern humans is made by an influential group of scientists.

Chris Stringer and David Gamble belong to neither of these schools. As far as they are concerned, the Neanderthals are pre-history. All that we have of them, simple artefacts apart, are a few score fossil finds, which have yielded only a dozen reasonably complete skeletons. To animate these fragments, the authors synthesise two approaches. Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, takes care of the biology; Gamble, of Southampton University, investigates Neanderthal behaviour.

It is a passionately controversial field, but all agree on the basics. Neanderthals were somewhat shorter than us, were much more powerful and had slightly larger brains. Their stock appeared a couple of hundred thousands years ago; they spread throughout the regions of Europe, western Asia and the Middle East that later comprised the world of classical antiquity; and by 30,000 years ago, they were gone. Their stone tools remained pretty similar throughout; they left no incontrovertible evidence of culture and only fleeting hints of an aesthetic sense.

When Marcellin Boule reconstructed a skeleton found in France in 1908, prejudice guided his hand. He arranged the bones on a simian rather than a human pattern; the resulting form resembled a gorilla more than a man. Since then, the pendulum has swung the other way. Neanderthal portraits have not only been purged of their simian characteristics, but have also been invested with a distinct air of nobility.

Scientists become unsettled by the implication that the Neanderthal is a sort of Plasticine figure, endlessly reshaped to fit changing ideas about humanity. Erik Trinkaus and David Shipman addressed the problem in their recent book, The Neanderthals: Changing the Image of Mankind (Jonathan Cape, pounds 20). Stringer and Gamble's own response is to approach their subject with unrelenting scepticism.

Excellently illustrated, their comprehensive guidebook to the Neanderthal world leads the reader through the intricacies of the human origins debate with an assured hand. It is not warm about its subjects, however. In their desire to avoid romanticism, Stringer and Gamble downplay the evidence that some Neanderthals buried their dead and cared for their sick. For Trinkaus and Shipman, behaviour like this is a sign that the Neanderthals were the first of the human family to have a sense of individuality, and that their society was complex. Stringer and Gamble take a strikingly different line, describing a social organisation too simple to require anything deserving to be called culture.

Underlying the different views of Neanderthal consciousness is a disagreement about the origins of modern humans. Chris Stringer is a leading advocate of the argument that modern humans emerged from Africa and replaced all the humans who had by then

spread around the Old World, without significant interbreeding. Erik Trinkhaus favours a more complex scenario, which would have left Europeans a legacy of Neanderthal genes.

It is the hottest topic in human origins today, and not just for scientific reasons. Since the defeat of Nazism and its racial ideology, Neanderthal studies have been influenced by the urge to discover what all humans have in common, rather than what divides us. In a somewhat uneasy epilogue, Stringer and Gamble acknowledge their emphasis on different tacks across this current. Let's just hope the tide doesn't change.