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:
“If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.”
—William Gass (b. 1924)
“... any fiction ... is bound to be transposed autobiography.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)