The Last Neanderthal

"I wanted to include this for two reasons. Claire Cameron is important as a very recent addition to this canon of people imagining Neanderthals in literary ways. Also, I’ve included it because it should be far better known. Although Cameron is a very well-respected Canadian author, this book was not published in the UK for some reason, but it should have been because it’s fabulous. For some of the book you are in the company of a Neanderthal community 40,000 years ago, and for the other part of the narrative you are with an archaeologist excavating a Neanderthal site today. It’s a split timeline and there are some conceptual and emotional links between those two timelines. For me, the archaeologist story is interesting in itself, but it’s the writing about the Neanderthals that I think is spectacular. I think it’s fabulous. Cameron, similar to Jean Auel but decades on, really took a lot of time to delve into the science and anthropology to try to understand where we are. This was published in 2017, and Cameron had masses more information than Auel had to draw on. Some of the things Auel wrote about, though, which people criticised her for at the time, turned out to be relatively accurate. That Homo sapiens and Neanderthals met, and that they interbred. And also, a lot of plant use. Auel assumes that they had profoundly intimate understanding of the botany of their world and that they used the plants. In the ‘80s, that was a bit ‘hhmm’; now, it’s quite clear from the archaeology that this had to have been widely true. You can create possibilities and potentialities, and some of those are maybe going to come to pass, to be supported. That doesn’t really happen with The Last Neanderthal because it’s so recent still. What I find really beautiful about this book is that she has elements that are a little more akin to Golding’s, in the sense that she really tries to express the landscape, the world, their conceptual understanding of themselves, their bodies, materials, from their own minds. Like Golding, she uses a lot of interesting metaphors and similes and sensory descriptions, and I think it’s incredibly well done and really quite affecting. People sometimes say to me, ‘Are you ever going to write a novel?’ And I always think, ‘I would have liked to write this one.’ Maybe not the archaeologist bit, but the Neanderthal sections are so close to the kind of feeling of what I would try to do. Yes, she knows! The copy of the book is actually an advance copy she sent, otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it. There’s just so much lovely stuff, it’s not only the language or the imagining; it’s also a good story in that this is about a Neanderthal family, but in this context while once again it’s about meetings, the Homo sapiens individual is already with the group, though you only slowly come to realise that. There are various dramas and things that happen. Although ‘drama’ makes it sound melodramatic, it’s not. It’s very starkly described, there are quite intense things that happen, it’s even quite funny in places, but eventually it builds to a point where there is another meeting with other Homo sapiens at the end. That is really powerfully done. And again, throughout it’s female protagonists. The main Neanderthal is a character just called Girl, and we never know who some of the other Homo sapiens are at the end, but they meet each other, and virtually the opposite of what takes place in The Inheritors . The encounter here is about recognition that there are differences, but that the similarities are more overwhelming, and both characters are emotionally overwhelmed with the incredible reality of each other. It’s a really powerful way of reimagining this trope of how we encounter and how we frame Neanderthals as Other, and what the reality of that would possibly be like. I think this is a fabulous book and I wish more people knew about it. There is no evidence for us to definitively say, ‘This was the character of those interactions.’ The question actually connects well to the next book, The Naked Neanderthal, by Ludovic Slimak."