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 – 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 – 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

***

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.)