Fiction books on prehistory and public awareness

[trehinp]

While mentioning the fiction book series "Hominids", "Hybrids" and "Humans", written by Robert J. Sawyer.
on another discussion board, it came to my mind that there are several other excellent fiction books narrating stories which take place in prehistory.

Some are extremely well documented and portray the style of living of our ancestors rather accurately, just adding the pinch of liveliness that scientific papers or books can't do: fiction allows the authors to use their imagination to extrapolate beyond the factual information collected by palaeoanthropologists.

What is the role of these fictions in developing public awareness about palaeoanthropology? In that category, what are the books that you have found to be rather faithful to what can be said about prehistoric life and those which are distorting far too much what we can reasonably imagins about that period?

Note that it isn't only for the sake of public awareness that I ask the question... I also like to have some entertaining readings, just for fun :-) so good books on this subject would also interest me...

So, anyone interested?

Yours sincerely.

Paul

[AWSX]

Paul,
I think that  'good'  fiction can certainly encourage public awareness of anthropolgy and counter some of the alternative crap (Atlantian refugees, ET colonys,  and lost civilizations) that become bestsellers.  Probably the best of the lot are Jean Auel's "Earth Children" series, though I do have some problems with her blonde heroine riding cave lions and that episode of  visions of the future at the end of  "Clan of the Cave Bear".  Auel does do research visiting archeological sites and archeologist  and is a financial supporter of Center for Study of First Americans.

The video media is probably even more effective. My favorite movie of all time is "Quest for Fire" which was released in 1982.  Unfortunately, due to the nudity, it can't be shown on network TV in the U.S..  The BBC/Discovery Channel  has produced several great programs on human evolution and Neanderthals which raises the normal TV fare by several levels.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Paul & al.

Being a true amateur of prehistory-based fiction, I can tell you that one of the best bibliographic site I have seen on the web can be found HERE.

This said, this discussion -- if it is to retain some palaeoanthropological credibility -- should steer clear of the "inane" and "literary irredeemable" material. ADDITION: I guess we'll have to define these terms as the discussion unfolds!

Jacques

[lagarvelho]

Jacques and all:

That list has been around for some time, but it looks like a fair amount of recent stuff has been added to it.  It doesn't have the Sawyer trilogy, though --- but then, that's probably a little *too* recent.  Anyway, there is a vast amount of stuff there, of varying degrees of "literary merit"  And there's some stuff on there that I think I will track down.  Just for the heck of it.
Anne G

[trehinp]

Probably the best of the lot are Jean Auel's "Earth Children" series, though I do have some problems with her blonde heroine riding cave lions and that episode of  visions of the future at the end of  "Clan of the Cave Bear".  Auel does do research visiting archeological sites and archeologist  and is a financial supporter of Center for Study of First Americans.

I agree with you, Auel's series is one of the bests. I also agree that, like most fiction writters, she's been tempted to add some spice to her stories, and in the case of riding the cave lion that was a bit too much. However in some other respect she has shown some excellent intuitions for which there is of course no scientific evidence but which make a lot of sense in relation with what we really know so far about life in the Upper Palaeolithic.

One thing that most fiction authors are allowed to do is to shortcut history, making many cultural evolution happen in a single lifespan when it took probably hundreds of generations to really make these cultural changes happen. But it is understandable that the pace of the stories would be kind of boring without that artifice... Auel does that in her series when she makes her heroes invent so many progressive techniques in just a few years time.

Roy Lewis "What we did to father" is an extreme case of this artifice which illustrates with great humour this historical shorcut often found in prehistorical fictions.

Jacques is right though, when fantasy does become ludicrous, it can then have the opposite effect, ie letting lunacies about our ancestors develop as popular myths.

The video media is probably even more effective. My favorite movie of all time is "Quest for Fire" which was released in 1982.  Unfortunately, due to the nudity, it can't be shown on network TV in the U.S..  The BBC/Discovery Channel  has produced several great programs on human evolution and Neanderthals which raises the normal TV fare by several levels.

I think that video are great, they tend to use the same historical shortcuts though... We've had several half fiction TV series on the BBC or on some other cultural channels. These too have to simplify history to make it accessible to the public at large.

Its fine with me. If it only triggers the interest in palaeoanthropology in a few people who will then seek for more in depth information, this is already a big step forward in my view.

The world wide web technology development over the past ten to fifteen years has enabled TV producers to make that mind opening process more accessible by providing websites attached to TV series, sometimes with discussion forums.  Sometimes real experts do participate both in the series conception and more rarely in the discussion forums.

As a side question, I was told about a fiction book on prehistory that addressed the subject of what it might have been to have a mental illness in the mid Palaeolithic. Does that ring a bell? I can't remember the title or the author which were mentioned over at a diner party and I couldn't write it down...

Yours sincerely.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

Auel's books are good --- I've read some, but not all of them.  And I remember the stuff about riding a lion.  Why the heck did she add this lion, anyway?  Oh well.  OTOH, "Clan of the Cave Bear", even when I first read it, and didn't know anything at all about the subject(not that I claim to know much now), tended to make me climb the walls.
Anne G

[trehinp]

Anne,

Could you be more specific in what elements of  "The Clan of the Cave Bear" tended to make me climb the walls?

That would help us start thinking about what is in our views reasonable fiction versus ludicrous invention as suggested by Jacques. As I said in my previous post, besides the episode of the cave lion, it was mainly that a single person could contribute so many technological and cultural breakthrough that ennoyed me in that series. (Taming a wolfe, riding horses, inventing the spear propulsor...)

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

The thing that struck me when I first read it(and this was some years ago), was that the Neandertals in her book couldn't "really" talk.  They used a gestural language to communicate ideas.  Also, they seemed unable to "think ahead."  At the time I read it, Neandertals were supposed(by most people anyway), to be some sort of subspecies of H.sapiens(I still think this is the case, but that's another story).  Also, at the time, I was very much "into" wolves(and I still am, but not in quite the same way).  I knew that there were a number of subspecies of wolves, but no matter what these subspecies *looked* like, they all could howl, had the same means of communication, formed packs, ate hoofed animals, had the same gestation periods, etc., etc.  IOW, all subspecies of wolves behave and act pretty much like, well, *wolves*.  Auel had the Neandertals acting quite "different" from "modern" humans, which really bothered me at the time, even though I knew absolutely nothing about Neandertals the first time I read it.  And I don't claim to know that much about them now.  It was also pointed out in some reviews of the book, that the "moderns" were all tall blond and smart, and the Neandertals were all short, stocky, dark haired and tork eyed, and *stupid".  I didn't "catch" this on the first reading, but once it was pointed out to me, that bothered me, too.  There were a number of other things, but  these were the things that most bothered me.
Anne G

[AWSX]

Anne,
That is interesting because I came away with a totally different impression. I had great empathy for Creb (Shanindar 5?) with all his physical disabilities and Izza for her knowledge of healing herbs. True they were not mathematicians but I thought Auel portrayed the Neanderthals with the same range of personalities that we see in modern humans.

Beside the limited vocabulary and body language for communication her other major theme  was the concept of 'racial memory' that is something like animal instinct that was inherited by all Neanderthals.  Has that concept been proposed academically?

From the lack of comments, I assume no one else is a fan of "Quest for Fire".  When I first saw the film I thought it was highly fictionalized with very hairy primative humans (presumably representing H. erectus), two very different tribes of modern humans and then the Neanderthals all living at the same time 80,000 years ago . However research over the last 20+ years has shown that it was al least possible. The best part of the film is the body language which was done by Desmond Morris. And the 'special effects' of making up elephants as wooley mammoths and lions as sabre tooth cats had to be a nightmare but it came off better than modern computer generated graffics.

[trehinp]

Anne,

I reacted somewhat like AWSX (Sorry I don't have your first name) about the way Jane Auel described the language and way of life of Neanderthals. I felt that she gave them credit for a wealth of knowledge and of cultural capabilities including some complex religious beliefs. Indeed it was that fictional depiction of Neanderthals in the Clan of the Cave Bear that induced to learn more about them as in my own research I had so far ignored their contribution to culture.

With regard to the language, I thought that Auel used the observations made on Neanderthal's larynx which was probably limiting the range of their speech production. This didn't seem to stop them to develop rather abstract concepts, in Auel's story.

In my opinion, this idea that Neanderthals were probably a lot smarter than previously thought seemed very present in Auel's "Children of Earth" series but I may be wrong. I got confirmation of this "smart Neanderthals" hypothesis in the books about Neanderthals culture : Baffier 1999, J. Jaubert 1999, J. L. Arsuaga 2001, F. d’Errico et Al 2003, which  I quoted in the discussion "And the winner was…" here on Palanth a few days ago.
These are books written in French, except the last one by F. D’Errico. If someone is interested I can give the full references of these texts.

For AWSX, I have no comments about the "Quest for Fire" movie as (shame on me) I never saw it…

Yours very friendly.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

I guess I read the Auel books with a somewhat different perspective from yours, being the Resident Wolf Expert and all(to make myself clearer, I think hominids/hominins and canids have "sort of" evolved in parallel ways, which is very interesting).  Anyway, at the time I first read it, I thought if all wolves can howl, etc., surely Neandertals and "moderns' had pretty much the same "equipment", so to speak.  You're correct(in a way), that Auel gave the Neandertals credit for knowing herblore and "folklore".  And Creb was based, I think, on Shanidar3(whichever of the Shanidars the "flower burial" was).  But Auel also sort of dropped the suggestion that they had smaller frontal lobes than "we" do(this is a suggestion that I discovered, originated with Marcellin Boule, based on the somewhat different head shape of Neandertals; more recent studies have suggested that Neandertal brains were not really any different from "ours")..  Also, the idea (exemplified by Iza), that N's had some kind of shared memories from the past, but somehow(exemplified in one scene between Ayla and Creb), they couldn't count to five, just sees kind of strange to me, but as I say, I' came at the book from a slightly different perspective, perhaps, than you did.  I will say this:  Auel did a *lot* of research for her books, and it shows.  She also is a good writer, actually one of the better writers around.  I just happen to think she took the "conventional" way out in dealing with relationships between Neandertals and "moderns", and the "moderns" come off smarter and very "Northwest European" looking.
Anne G

[trehinp]

Indeed Anne,

The question of language abilities of Neanderthals versus those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (AMM) still has a long life ahead...  Some like Trinkaus think that besides a small accent Neanderthals language would be indistinguishable from  AMM language. A contrario Steve Mithen considers in "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body" that there were some differences between the two species. I will take that discussion to the Palaeolinguistics. .board as it out of the scope of this present discussion about fiction books.

In view of the publication date of "the Clan of the Cave Bear", 1980, I have the feeling that Jean Auel's presentation was rather ahead of her time : Trinkaus work dates of 1993. But in this discussion the reader's perception depends a lot on her / his own background (The French socio-psychologist Abraham Moles speaks of individual cognitive universes which color the way we perceive the environment) 

While looking on the internet for Neanderthal's language abilities, I came accros the article on Neanderthal in wikipedia.
Even though we are not speaking here of fiction, this seems to be another way to sensitise the public at large about palaeoanthropology. I would like to have the opinion of Palanth readers on this wikipedia article and on the role of such new media for spreading our interest for prehistory.

Yours sincerely.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

You should use Wikipedia with some caution, as not all the data contained in the articles are necessarily quite accurate.  One glaring inaccuracy I found was the claim that Joachim Neander, after whom the famous valley was named, lived in the 18th century.  He didn't.  He only lived to be 30 years old or so, and he died five years before the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Handel, but I guess this part is kind of OT.  Also, while they discussed the theory that Neandertals may have contributed red hair to some succeeding European "modern" populations, they made absolutely no mention of the Lagar Velho find, and generally dismissed the idea of admixture, which suggests to me that they relied rather heavily on the theories of certain proponents of certain ideas.  Personally, I think this is a rather glaring omission, but then, I didn't write the original article.
Anne G

[trehinp]

I agree Anne,

Wikipedia is pretty much the result of the input of the internautes and as such should always be taken with a grain of salt :-) But hopefully, with the reactivity of internet readers and some virtual cooperation, definitions should improve over time.

Back on the subject of fiction books,  I'm starting the last of the three "Neanderthal Paralax"  book series by Robert J. Sawyer's :  "Hybrids". I much enjoyed the two first books. I'm enjoying the third one.

From your background in the Neanderthal way of life, what do you think of the way in which Sawyer extrapolated the cultural evolution in a world occupied by neanderthals ,

Yours very friendly.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

I enjoyed the whole "Neanderthal Parallax" series, too.  And I'm told Sawyer is working on *another* series of books that's related to this set.  That's about all I know about it, though, although I['ve also been told he's very approachable and friendly.  Anyway, to get back to "Hybrids", quite frankly, I'm not sure.  On the one had, there pare hunter-gatherer people living on Earth today who have basically moved from small-group foraging in rather hostile climates(I'm thinking of various Inuit groups here), to a more or less "modern" way of life, with various technologies for their use.  A lot of these folks seem to have websites that attempt to explain themselves to the rest of the world.  So I'm sure it's possible for people like Neandertals(at least in the form SAwyer postis them)to do the same thing.  They were certainly smart enough, IMO.  OTOH, there are other groups, in more "suitable" climates, that have adopted agriculture in recent times(e.g., some of the "Bushmen" of the Kalahari).  And to complicate things further, there are known examples of foragers who started out as "horticulturalists", but when certain significant additions to their culture came into play they adopted a "forager" way of life.  I'm thinking here of certain groups of Plains Indians, who became a *lot* more mobile(to say the least), when they "discovered" horses.  Of course, this particular Plains Indian cuilture didn't last very long, but that's another story.  Now you have to remember that these are all *modern* humans we're talkiing about.  Sawyer posits that his Neandertals went straight from foraging to a highly "technological" culture, which benevolently controlled populations, environments, etc.  But, as I said, something of this *same* pattern is seen among certain Inuit groups.  And apparently Sawyer --- and the sources he used --- are unaware of this.  But then, these sources consider Neandertals to be an entirely different "species" from ourselves.  The trouble with that is, there is an increasing amount of archaeological evidence, the latest of which is that report of Neandertal hunting strategies out of the Georgian Republic, which suggests that Neandertals hunted pretty much the same way "modern" humans did.  So, behaviorally, N's weren't all that different, if different at all, from "moderns".  Make of this what you will, because these questions are basically unresolved.  Which, for novelistic purposes, leaves room for all sorts of interpretations.

Sorry if I didn't answer your question,
Anne G