clan of the cave bear

[bakeme]

i just finished reading cormac mccarthy's border trilogy recently, which i both enjoyed and had deep and intractable issues with. he seemed to delight in having numerous, repeated, egregiously frequent dialogues in spanish, a language i do not, unfortunately, speak. it was the first time i've come across a piece of fiction that either a) assumed

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[randomdreams]

Jean (something) Auel, I believe, wrote Clan Of The Cave Bear.
I read that just for the one rather tame these days sex scene because I was 12 when it came out.

And yeah there's a fair bit of evidence that neandertals were doing fine, and possibly interbreeding. There is also evidence for several other species, or possibly varieties, of human-like primates at similar states of development in other areas of the globe. Maybe they weren't actually much more different from us than aboriginal australians are from icelanders.

[bakeme]

oh yeah, i remember something about how it has a sex scene. haven't gotten there yet.

glad for the confirmation about neanderthals. i'm good at opinions, but not always sure what my backing evidence is.

[fuerve]

When I was going to school for anthropology about, oh, 1.5 million years ago, the prevailing notion was that Neandertal man was less organized and better able to focus (to a point where he could grind a stone tool for an entire day without feeling bored or ancy). Possibly less imaginative as well.

The adaptations that allowed homo sapiens to survive, if the state of anthropological knowledge in 2004 is to be believed, were things like spatial organization (neandertals tended to shit where they ate, whereas H. sapiens had clearly separate activity spaces), boredom/fidgitiness and imagination. All of those qualities have their drawbacks, just like sickle cells do, but when your enemy is malaria, you deal with anemia, and when your enemies are saber-toothed tigers and ice ages, you deal with attention deficit and superstition.

[kellwho]

The books pretty much devolve into bodice-ripper sex scene filled fantasy as the series progresses. That said, I devoured them all as a teen, and not just because I wanted to live in the Valley of Horses and ride a sabre toothed tiger,. Nope. :)