Families ancient and modern: the ties that make us human

Review of: The Last Neanderthal

Author: Claire Cameron
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Source: Dallas Public Library
Grade: A

Move over, Ayla. Author Claire Cameron’s novel, The Last Neanderthal, turns stereotypes about the meeting of ancient and modern humans on their heads with a tough, smart and strangely charming heroine who’s – a Neanderthal. Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series was the definitive prehistoric fiction of the 1980’s, with its tall blonde modern-type human heroine Ayla striding across an Ice Age landscape. But with a new century and a wealth of new findings about human migration and culture (including verification of Auel’s supposition of human-Neanderthal sexual interactions) Cameron reinvents the prehistoric genre. 

This time around, there are a pair of heroines -- Girl, about to come of age in a Neanderthal family dominated by powerful matriarch Big Mother, and Rosamund Gale, the paleoarchaeologist enthralled by the discovery of a twin burial.  

“We knew well from the recent advent of DNA testing that many modern humans had inherited genes from Neanderthals and vice versa,” Cameron writes, speaking for Gale, “but beyond the obvious method of transfer, we knew little about the relations between them. . . (Now) the remains of a Neanderthal lay with those of a modern human. . . their position was evidence of more complex communication between the two, something that I had always assumed would be lost to time. Now it was found.”

But Gale’s chance to complete work on the skeletons is running out. A wished-for but unplanned pregnancy complicates her work physically (how can she assume her normal face-down excavation posture given her rapidly-expanding belly?) and emotionally as fellow workers marginalize her ability to deal with impending childbirth and the needs of her newborn.

And, although separated by tens of thousands of years, Girl’s time is running out as well. Big Mother’s last mate died in a hunting accident. Her oldest daughter, Girl’s sister, moved to a new family at the last spawning run of the fish that are their main source of summer food. But accidents, predators, and illness have taken their toll on the remainder of Big Mother’s children, leaving at last only Girl and a single older brother. And Runt, a strange, small boy found wandering alone the previous year and adopted by the Neanderthals.

As the two youngest children of Big Mother’s family, Girl and Runt have become companions. She is big-boned, pale-skilled and red-haired. He is short, skinny and dark, with hair like moss, and so ugly Girl fears he will never be able to find a woman when he comes of age. His own language is unintelligible to the family, and though he has learned enough of the language of Girl’s family to communicate, he can give them no idea of where he came from or what happened to separate him from his own people.

In their family’s isolation, Girl and her older brother find themselves drawn to each other in a way forbidden by Neanderthal tradition. Big Mother temporarily expels Girl from the family, believing her strong enough to survive on her own. But when both Big Mother and Girl’s brother are killed by a leopard attack, Girl is left pregnant with no help except Runt’s unlikely aid.

Cameron creates sympathetic, compellingly realized versions both of Neanderthal culture and the complexities of a modern archaeological excavation as The Last Neanderthal alternates between the stories of Girl and Rosamunde Gale, two women struggling each in her own way and in her own time with the issues of motherhood, family, independence, and trust. It’s a story less about differences between people than about the eternal similarities that make us human.

Adventure classics – The Neanderthals still among us

The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel/Dance of the Tiger, by Björn Kurtén

With commentary from The Neanderthals Rediscovered, by Dimitra Papagianni & Michael A. Morse

***

Two seminal volumes of paleofiction, Jean Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger, end with the tragic assumption that Neanderthals and the modern humans who cohabited Europe and Asia with them for thousands of years are now forever parted. In Auel’s 1980 story, modern human heroine, Ayla, is torn from her young half-Neanderthal son as the clan expels her from its home cave. Kurtén’s book of 1978 posits a more peaceable relationship but theorizes that sexual relations between the two species (or possibly subspecies) of humankind, never produced fertile offspring.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, and scientists now find that except for those of purely indigenous African origin, all living people owe part of their DNA to Neanderthals. There’s even evidence that modern-type human beings mingled genes with still other now-extinct human species. We have met the ancient ones and they are us.

It’s time we started treating them with the respect they deserve.

“Although we know a great deal of the Neanderthals’ specific history, for most people . . . (t)heir name is a synonym for primitiveness, brutality, backward thinking and generally being out of step with the times,” archaeologist Dimitra Papagianni and science historian Michael A. Morse write in The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story.

They trace the fictional versions of Neanderthals all the way back to J.H. Rosny-Aîné’s La Guerre du feu, source of the 1981 movie, Quest for Fire. (The film is a much livelier romp than the turgid 1986 film version of The Clan of the Cave Bear.)

Papagianni and Morse consider the most thought-provoking fictions about Neanderthal-human interactions to be Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger and Isaac Asaimov's 1958 science fiction story, "The Ugly Little Boy," which Robert Silverberg expanded in his 1991 novel, Child of Time, although noting that no fictional protrayal of Neanderthals "has widespread support in the non-fiction universe. Even the plausible stereotypes are not based on any archaeological evidence."

None of that, of course, has stopped storytellers from spinning yarns about the exploits and foibles of these early humans.

In researching this post, I was thrilled to discover, besides the fictions mentioned by Papagianni and Morse, voluminous lists of paleoanthropology fiction and paleofiction that sent me scurrying through the stacks at the Dallas Public Library.

Among the works of fiction I can personally recommend are Asimov’s “The Ugly Little Boy,” Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger, and Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear. Auel has written five more books in her “Earth’s Children” series, but the first is the best, before she felt compelled to add a lumbering Cro-Magnon solely to serve as a love interest for the heroine.

I also fondly remember Michael Bishop’s 1985 Ancient of Days, in which pre-Neanderthal Homo habilis survive into modern times. And for prehistoric but modern-type humans, I like Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ The Animal Wife and the Native American novels of anthropologist/archaeologist writing team W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear.

Long live the ancient ancestors.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a June of stories by Southwestern authors with Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir of Robert E. Howard, One Who Walked Alone, and a selection of Howard’s Western tales.)

Adventure classics – Inhabiting the minds of the ancients

The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel/Dance of the Tiger, by Björn Kurtén

With commentary from How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn & Frederick L. Coolidge

***

After years of reading, and sometimes writing, historical fiction, I’m often disturbed by the difficulty of getting into the minds and hearts of people from eras far removed from my own. When even the deepest thoughts and feelings of people who know day to day can seem enigmatic – when even our own minds are often completely mysterious – is it even possible to get into the heads of others long gone? Maybe we can make reasonable guesses about the lives and hearts of people since the advent of written language. But those who lived before writing was invented? Or at least whose symbolic languages are now indecipherable? And what if those languages aren’t even quite what we’d call human?

It’s that adventure of turning  bones and stones into heart and minds of the long-dead that intrigued writers like Björn Kurtén and Jean Auel whose Dance of the Tiger (1978) and The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) bravely ventured into a genre Kurtén termed paleofiction. In fact, they were ventures into the minds of the Neanderthals, those mysterious people who predated our own species. (Although there had been previous surveys into this unknown country, dating as least as far back as William Golding’s 1955 novel, The Inheritors, none of them had lasting impact.)

Recently, I’ve been fascinated to come across another book, How to Think Like a Neandertal, (2012) by archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge, that attempts to put some science into fictional re-imaginings about the hearts and minds of the Neanderthals.

(And no, the difference between my spelling and Wynn and Coolidge's isn’t a typographical error. Despite the title of Coolidge and Wynn’s book, I’m sticking by what seems to be the most common American spelling and one still current, at least as of the June 2016 issue of Discover magazine currently lying on my desk, whose cover plugs an article entitled, “When Neanderthals Replaced Us.” The “h” is silent, whichever spelling you use.)

Last Friday, I wrote about one of the central passages in Auel’s book, in which her (modern-type) human heroine, Ayla, accidently witnesses a religious ritual honoring the totem cave bear of her adopted Neanderthal tribe. In one of the nonfiction books written by Kurtén (whose scientific specialty was Ice Age fauna) he debunked the possibility that any humans, Neanderthal or modern, had observed rituals regarding the gigantic, now extinct bears.

However, in his Dance of the Tiger, Kurtén allowed his Neanderthal characters other religious attributes, especially bird totems who lead the dead into the next world. Could the degree of abstract thinking needed to conceive of an afterlife and supernatural beings have been within the bounds of possibility for Neanderthals? If they could imagine that, might they have eventually imagined other scientific or philosophical abstractions?

“The archaeological record of Neandertals provides us with nothing comparable (to figurative symbols),” Coolidge and Wynn report, "but to be fair we must also note that . . . unambiguous examples of symbols are pretty rare for modern humans until well after 30,000 years ago. . . On the other hand we cannot attribute symbolic culture to Neandertals just because it would be fair. There needs to be evidence, even if it is indirect."

Their conclusion: that what is known about Neanderthals’ use of symbols, including the ultimate symbol of language, suggests only minimal ability to imagine abstractions. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but unfortunately for those of us who’d like to get into their minds, there’s no hard evidence that those minds would have been very spacious dwellings.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a May of prehistoric fiction with a survey of the works spawned by Kurtén and Auel.)

Adventure classics – The softer side of the Neandertals?

Dance of the Tiger

by Björn Kurtén

***

I could almost call them the father and mother of Neandertal fiction – Finnish scientist Björn Kurtén's 1978 Dance of the Tiger mating with Jean Auel’s 1980 Clan of the Cave Bear to produce a progeny of stories set in deep prehistory.

Both Kurtén and Auel tell the story of a human child adopted during the great ice ages into a clan of Neandertals, those distant cousins of the rest of us modern humans. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that Kurten and Auel ever met. His book, originally published in Swedish, was only translated into English in the same year Auel’s appeared. You might call it a case of the convergent evolution of literature, except that each writer turns the other’s version on its head.

Auel’s heroine, Ayla, is the light-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed modern human both rescued and in a sense enslaved by darker-skinned Neandertals with a rigidly-defined separation of gender roles. In Kurten’s version, the Neandertals are the Whites, who have evolved elaborate nonviolent rituals to defuse aggression in their society and modern humans, the Blacks, who show the signs of their more recent migration out of the African heartland in their dark skin and black hair. And it’s these modern humans whose sexes follow culturally-determined gender roles.

It’s a bit scary to think that the popularity of Auel’s version of prehistory may hinge on a more conventionally photogenic protagonist.

And although writing before the decoding of either human or Neandertal genomes could confirm its truth, both authors agree on one aspect of the meeting between modern humans and Neandertals: they definitely practiced interspecies sex. (Which is, come to think of it, one of our modern criteria for determining whether somebody else is, well, human.)

In Dance of the Tiger's version, the meeting between the two versions of humanity takes place in his native Scandinavia during an interglacial warm period between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago. As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his introduction to the English edition of Dance of the Tiger, this epoch included “one of the most momentous and mysterious events of human prehistory. . . the rapid replacement of Neandertal man in Western Europe by humans of modern aspect.”

During a mammoth hunt, young Tiger becomes separated from his band of hunters as invading warriors ambush them. In the melee, Tiger’s father is killed and the boy himself is left for dead, only to be discovered and nursed back to life by a passing band of Neandertals, the beings his people call Trolls.

“Short and white and beardless,” as Tiger’s father describes them, “in broad daylight the Trolls seemed to be inferior beings, comical sometimes, or faintly sinister, making odd gestures with their hands about their faces and jabbering in a weird tongue utterly unlike human speech. Yet at night, the sight of these stumpy figures with their large pale faces and hooded eyes seemed . . . to bear a menace of secret witchcraft, of deep cunning, perhaps even wisdom, of a kind denied to Men.”

These creatures, these Trolls, become the beings among whom Tiger grows to manhood, learning their language and at last falling in love with Veyde, the daughter of their matriarchal leader.

Still, he longs to avenge his father, killed by bandits headed by a powerful shaman called Shelk. When Veyde’s tribe is attacked and captured by Shelk’s fighters while Tiger is away on a seal hunt, he tracks the bandits to their camp, determined to free the people he now considers his own and kill the bandits’ murderous leader.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a May of historical fiction with Björn Kurtén’s prehistoric clash of civilizations, Dance of the Tiger. And by the way, which is the correct name, Neandertal or Neanderthal?)