Björn Kurtén (1924–1988)

Perfectly fine sequel to "Dance of the Tiger", in which the children of Tiger play as prominent a role as do the people of Tiger's own generation. I'm currently attempting a few of Kurten's essays and am concluding that he was a better novelist than essayist. I really wish both books in the series had included maps, however. The characters travel from one place to another very frequently, but one has little idea of where any of these places are, in spite of some attempts to explain in an afterward.… (mehr)

A paleontologist writes a novel of Neandertals and Cro-Magnons during an ice age long ago. Very '70s, but not at all bad. There are somewhat unsuccesful inventions of two technologies, war and domestication of animals, but the time will come when those inventions are completed. The author speculates on the precise way in which the Neandertal peoples were displaced by the Cro-Magnon somewhat plausibly. He was ahead of his time. For many years, it was felt that modern humans were not related to Neandertal, but more recent research seems to indicate that most humans are carrying around a bit of Neandertal DNA.… (mehr)

What picture does the word “neandertal” conjure up? Something hunched? Hulking? Brutish? Lumbering? It’s extraordinary that after more than a century this image persists so stubbornly, because it’s quite wrong and in an Introduction to the 1980 edition of this novel biologist Steven J Gould explained how such a grotesque cartoon ever came about in the first place.
    Dance of the Tiger was primarily a vehicle for Björn Kurtén’s theory about their disappearance; but it was also an attempt to bring both them and our own ancestors properly to life as people. Back in the 1950s Kurtén was one of the world’s leading authorities on this whole subject, but some of his ideas were so radical even he only put them forward in this form (which he himself described as “palaeo-fiction”). It’s set in what is today south-eastern Sweden, 35,000 years ago during one of the warmer intervals between successive glaciations, and there are two kinds of human on the planet: the Cro-Magnons from Africa via Asia, who year on year are encroaching ever further into the lands of the indigenous Neandertal population of Europe. There’s misunderstanding, conflict, friendship and interbreeding. We get a good idea of the kind of world this was happening in too, with its glacial eskers and moraines, its woolly rhinos, mammoths and sabre-toothed cats.
    It’s not the story itself here which will stick in my mind (I found the middle part a bit tedious to be honest), or Kurtén’s theory either; that can now be discounted, particularly since completion in 2010 of the Neandertal Genome Project. For me, and I would guess a lot of other readers too, what’s most striking is his sympathetic (in fact unforgettable) depiction of neandertals as living breathing people: their customs and manners, their minds. And, unlike his theory about their disappearance, much of it is looking increasingly accurate.
    Oh yes, and one final thing: so why did they disappear? The answer is, they didn’t entirely. With the single exception of anyone from Africa south of the Sahara desert, everyone else on the planet today has a small percentage of Neandertal genes in their chromosomes—so they’re still here, part of what most of us are, part of our own ancestry. And if Kurtén’s portrayal of them as people is even half accurate, it’s quite possible too that at least some of our better qualities come from them.… (mehr)