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

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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

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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 – Girl meets bear-god: what's possible?

The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel

with commentary from The Cave Bear Story, by Björn Kurtén

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By Ursus, I thought I’d found it – Ursus spelaeus, that is, the missing link, I hoped, between Jean Auel’s 1980 spear-swashing prehistoric romance, The Clan of the Cave Bear and Björn Kurtén’s near-contemporary prehistoric writings, including his The Cave Bear Story: Life and Death of a Vanished Animal.

It first seemed too much of a coincidence that Auel’s first book and one of Finnish scientist Kurtén’s slim and all too rare works of fiction, Dance of the Tiger, were both near contemporaries of each other with almost mirror image plots. Both described the adoption of modern human children into groups of Neandertals (or Neanderthals – the pronunciation is the same) during the great Ice Ages. Unfortunately, further investigation showed that Kurtén’s work didn’t appear in English until 1980, the same year Auel’s more massive book. So unless she wrote like the wind. . .  But no, it wasn’t going to work.

Maybe, I thought, searching the catalog of the Dallas Public Library, there was some earlier writing of Kurtén’s that Auel had referenced. Could it be his nonfiction, The Cave Bear Story, available in English by 1976? No, again. In fact, Kurtén completely demolishes the title myth of Auel’s book – ritualistic worship of the gigantic extinct cave bears by a clan of Neanderthals (or any humans, for that matter).

Most modern paleontologists agree with Kurtén. And to think what a lovely central motif Auel’s brand of cave bear worship made. What reader could forget the great gathering of Neanderthal clans in The Clan of the Cave Bear, a gathering at which the great bear is killed and eaten. Or the sacramental, males-only accidentally observed by Auel’s human heroine, Ayla, which confers her with shamanistic powers.

Not that Auel went completely out on a limb with the bear-god idea. The myth’s source lay in the early 20^th century discovery by Emil Bächler at Drachenloch (Dragon’s Lair) Cave in the Swiss Alps.  Located at an altitude that would have made it accessible only during an interglacial period coinciding with the Neanderthals’ early existence in Europe, the cave contained great numbers of cave bear remains, including skulls and leg bones. “To his surprise,” Kurtén writes, “Bächler came to realize that the skulls and bones . . . seemed to be oriented rigidly in certain preferred directions. Could they have been deliberately placed there by man?”

Unfortunately for Bächler’s theory, he took no photographs, and what appeared to him to be  human artifacts were destroyed during a later excavation. His own sketches, published in 1923 and 1940, contradict both each other and his written descriptions. Finally, there is no surviving evidence for any human occupation of the cave other than brief occasional visits by individuals or small groups.

But what about the alignment of the bones? Wasn’t that of human origin?

“It is evident that repeated pushing (by successive waves of hibernating bears) of such elongate objects as skulls, jaws, and long bones into niches or along walls will inevitably tend to align them in the same direction,” Kurtén writes, “. . . while skulls in the middle of the cave floor will be trampled to fragments. . . ”

And Auel’s image of the mostly vegetarian cave bears as benign guiding spirits? “The African buffalo is also a complete vegetarian, but he does not impress one as docile,” Kurtén reports wryly. Tellingly, his books are not among the references Auel’s lists on her website.

I’ve read all of Auel’s books, devouring such tidbits as how people could boil water before the invention of waterproof vessels (pottery or metal). Or herbal use, or tool making, or leather tanning, or how to hunt a wooly rhinoceros. If she writes another book, as is sometimes rumored, I’ll read it too. But for reference material, I’ll take Kurtén.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a May of prehistoric fiction with Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger.)

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?)