In Fiction
William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors follows a group of Neanderthals towards the end of their era, showing their interactions with early present-day humans (but from the Neanderthals' viewpoint). The novel posits a mixture of extinction by violence, competitive displacement and inter-breeding as the causes of the Neanderthals' disappearance, and usefully illustrates that the different extinction hypotheses need not be mutually exclusive.
Dance of the Tiger, is a novel depicting Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interaction, by paleontologist Björn Kurtén, published in English in 1980. Kurten also depicts a complex interaction, although he suggests that inter-breeding led to sterile offspring, itself contributing to Neanderthal extinction.
Read more about this topic: Neanderthal Extinction Hypotheses
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)