Illustrations on endpapers.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- The first face -- The river fells the tree -- Bodies growing -- Bodies living -- Ice and fire -- The rocks remain -- Material world -- Eat and live -- Chez Neanderthal -- Into the land -- Beautiful things -- Minds inside -- Many ways to die -- Time travellers in the blood -- Denouements -- Immortal beloved -- Epilogue.

Neanderthal expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland, and reveals the Neanderthal you don't know, our ancestor who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. This book sheds new light on where they lived, what they ate, and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that researchers have discovered.