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And what should we make of the protagonists of Steven Mithen's speculative tour de force, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (Harvard Univ. Press), reviewed by John McWhorter in Books & Culture? Mithen complains, rightly, that music has gotten short shrift in accounts of cognitive evolution, and he sets out to correct that imbalance with a particular emphasis on the Neanderthals—compared to whom, he's convinced, "all modern humans are relatively limited in their musical abilities." And yet these Neanderthals are nothing but stick figures with emotions—"intensely emotional beings," Mithen says, capable of love and fear and guilt and happiness. Why? "Such emotions were present because their lifestyle required intelligent decision-making and extensive social cooperation." Of course! That explains it. And because his own theory of their particular cognitive pluses and minuses rules it out, Mithen sides with the skeptics who claim that what appears to be a flute discovered in 1995 at a Neanderthal site at Divje Babe in Slovenia—mentioned, as it happens, on Paul Griffiths' first page—is really just a bone with wonderfully round, flute-spaced holes chewed in it by carnivores.

Are we condemned then to see only what we want to see, like a Young Earth creationist faced with Prothero's book, or Prothero himself wanting to torque his history to preach against "interference" with "nature"? If so, there's no point in reading anything. But even though our judgment is ever fallible, damaged not least by sin, God's common grace has given us resources to correct our blindspots and others', so long as we maintain a reasonable humility and a readiness to read and listen as widely as possible.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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