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:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)