Twist any paleontologist's arm and you'll eventually elicit a fantasy about meeting long-extinct animals in the flesh. That's understandable enough, for fossil bones and teeth are frustratingly mute about so many of the things that made them the living organisms they once were. This is never more true than with the fossils of early hominids. But few paleoanthropologists have actually had the nerve to go public with their most imaginative musings, at least partly because they are so conscious of the gulf between what can and cannot reliably be said.
Novelists, on the other hand, need have no such scruples, and here are two who certainly don't. John Darnton, chief London correspondent for the New York Times, has entered the arena with a book called Neanderthal (Random House; 368 pages; $24), centered on the large-brained human species that, as far as paleontologists are concerned, became extinct about 27,000 years ago. Simultaneously, screenwriter Petru Popescu has weighed in with Almost Adam (William Morrow; 544 pages; $24), about australopiths, a group of small-brained but upright-walking human precursors whose most recent fossils are more than a million years old. Eschewing time machines and historical settings, both authors have opted to have modern paleoanthropologists come face to face with relict populations of early hominids in remote and unexplored corners of the world: the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan in Darnton's case, southern Kenya in Popescu's.
The similarities don't stop there. In many ways both writers' books have more in common with a science-fiction view of the human future than with any rational interpretation of our species' past. Mad scientists were perhaps obligatory, but who would have thought that both Neanderthals and australopiths communicated using not language (fair enough) but esp? And in both novels, two sets of primitives, good and bad, battle it out; younger researchers meet their former professors under bizarre circumstances; sexual tension breaks out between scientists and primitive hominids; and fieldworkers become the innocent pawns of dark political and military maneuverings.
Regrettably, both novelists use these intrigues and their violent consequences to avoid the larger and much more interesting issues implicit in the confrontation of ancient and modern hominids. The heroes of both books eventually decide to keep their extraordinary discoveries secret. Most remarkable of all, distinguished scientists in both books spend an inordinate amount of time laboriously explaining to one another stuff they had to have learned as undergraduates. Couldn't more convincing stooges have been found?
The authors have, of course, done their homework, but neither anywhere near as diligently as, say, Jean Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear); they get C's at best. Despite their authoritative tone, these books are mines of misinformation--and not just in detail. They are to paleoanthropology what Indiana Jones is to archaeology--pure fantasy constructs. And while this may sound like carping on my part, given that these are, after all, works of fiction, it's fair to point out that no scientist likes to see his field of study caricatured--all the more so when the caricaturists have taken Hollywood for millions of dollars in movie rights for what are pretty run-of-the-mill potboilers.