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The Inheritors - Episode 15
242 Plays7 years ago
Matthew Pope of UCL and Beccy Scott of the British Museum shed light on the extraordinary tale of the Neanderthal Lok and his extended family written by William Golding. Given the topic of Golding's more famous work, Lord of the Flies, it's not surprising that things get a bit vicious in this book too when some other kind of humans turn up. But were our ancestors really that vile?
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Transcript
Introduction to Prehistory in Fiction
00:00:03
Speaker
you are listening to the archaeology podcast network the archaeology podcast network is sponsored by codify a california benefit corporation visit codify at www.codifi.com
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Prehistoricist podcast with me, your host Kim Biddelph.
Exploring 'The Inheritors' by William Golding
00:00:34
Speaker
The theme of this podcast is to look at representations of prehistory and fiction. Studying prehistory is to study the human condition, especially when we look at early prehistory. And in no book we've featured so far is this more apparent than in the book we're going to talk about tonight.
00:00:51
Speaker
No surprise, since it is written by the author of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, which also poses lots of questions about what humans are capable of, tonight we're talking about his book set at the time when Neanderthals met humans for the first time, the Inheritors.
00:01:31
Speaker
And tonight I am talking with someone that I've had on the podcast before and he was so much fun that I've asked him back. Hello, Matt. This is Matt Pope of UCL. Hello, Kim. Hello. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm all right. Yeah. Great. We're talking to you again and a great book as well.
00:01:51
Speaker
I know and well you recommended this book so and I had not heard of it before so it was brilliant to get it and read it and it's such an affecting book it really is. So William Golding's The Inheritors has got some interesting themes in it.
Comparative Analysis of Neanderthal Portrayals
00:02:12
Speaker
So Matt, last time we talked we talked about The Clan of the Cave Bear which obviously
00:02:18
Speaker
very different book, but it still has the first Cline of the Cave Bear has the same kind. It's based on the same topic, isn't it? It's about the meeting of Neanderthals and humans and what happened. And it obviously has a very different viewpoint to this book, partly due to the age. So the Cline of the Cave Bear was first published in 1980, but the Inheritors dates back to 1955. So it is a little bit different.
00:02:46
Speaker
are really very different books. I mean, I don't think it's just down to the fact that they occur in different times with different understanding from the archaeology. I think what they're trying to do as books is very different too, which is why, you know, The Inheritors is definitely my favourite over the two. Well, the genre is completely different. I mean, The Clan of the Cave Bear books are really like
00:03:12
Speaker
sagas aren't they? They're like almost on pot boilers, you know? Bodice rippers. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, but William Golding, it's definitely a literary book.
Golding's Literary Impact and Approach
00:03:29
Speaker
It is, first and foremost. It's a work of literature. He was just off the back of Lord of the Flies. He won the Nobel Prize
00:03:39
Speaker
eventually went on to win the Man Booker Prize. You know, he's one of the great English writers. And I think one of the treasures of this is the intersection of a British writer
00:03:50
Speaker
intersecting with our subject with prehistory and let's see what happens. Exactly because I mean he really goes to a lot of trouble to work at how to write about somebody who thinks in a completely different way to the way we do and to try and get into their heads and yet having not done a great deal of research. Well although he was fascinated by the subject.
00:04:16
Speaker
He didn't do any research, apart from having a general interest in prehistory. I actually read the introduction, the introductory pages to my old battered copy of The Inheritors. And one of the things that stunned me was that what he sent to Faber and Faber was just a rough draft. He described it as a rough, hewn block.
00:04:42
Speaker
publishers said no that's brilliant we're going to publish it. He wrote back instantly and said I haven't spoken to any archaeologists about this at all and they said it doesn't matter and you know so you know obviously we've got to imagine this as being William Golding's first draft and yeah going to be detailed there he was going to run it past archaeological and prehistoric experts and that never happened this is entirely from his imagination
00:05:11
Speaker
Yes exactly and in a certain way there are inaccuracies even from what was known about Neanderthals in the 1950s and obviously there's been a lot more found out since then but in a way he's
Depiction of Neanderthals in 'The Inheritors'
00:05:30
Speaker
I wonder whether it would have spoiled it somehow if they'd had more accurate. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, we'll get into it. But obviously, there has been a lot of research into Neanderthals recently. And you've been doing quite a lot of that. I mean, I know on our last podcast, we talked about some of the stuff you've been doing. But if you can update us about, have you dug up any Neanderthals yet? Or is it really just? I mean, I've been up in northern Europe.
00:05:58
Speaker
What have we got in terms of Neanderthals? We've got, you know, teeth from Pont Neuith Cave and a few teeth from Lakota, St. Belard. No, unfortunately, Neanderthals fossils are very thin on the ground in our region. But, yeah, as I think I mentioned last time, myself and Becky Scott and a, you know, a large team, you know, we're lucky enough to be working on material from Lakota, St. Belard, which in the region, being in the Channel Islands, is all
00:06:26
Speaker
massive archive of Neanderthal behavior spanning, you know, getting on for 200,000 years. So yeah, we've all been immersed in that, but it's mainly stone tools and butchered animal remains.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, which obviously tells you lots about Neanderthal behaviour. I hope to talk to Becky Scott, thank you for mentioning her, and about this book as well because she really enjoys this book too. Yeah, and we talked together about Stig of the Dump, which was interesting because with Stig you don't really know if he's supposed to be a Neanderthal because at the end he helps raise a stone circle and I'm like, no, no, that's not Neanderthal, but anyway, we've talked about that before.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah, I thought, so if we give a, I'll just have a short pricey of the book. Because I mean, we've talked a little bit about it already. But basically, they, there's a, it follows a group of Neanderthals who
00:07:25
Speaker
seem to be a small family group or an extended family group I should say and their first meeting with some homo sapiens people and it as I say it really doesn't paint us in a very positive light in a way it's you know what it reminded me of which is really anachronistic is the predator film
00:07:49
Speaker
Yes. It really felt like, from the Neanderthals point of view, that there's these weird, completely technologically advanced and vicious, evil creatures waiting for them in the woods. Totally. And beyond their conception of understanding, what they're even looking at, what they're hearing, they haven't got the memories, they haven't got the experience, they don't even
00:08:18
Speaker
know what they're seeing and what they're encountering, which is powerful, isn't it? That's powerful. It is very powerful. It takes them ages to work out what they're actually seeing and what, you know, that... Yes, anyway, let's talk about... I wanted to talk about the way that Golding actually describes the Neanderthals. Yeah.
00:08:39
Speaker
they from what I can glean from the book they're kind of described as having pale skin but they've got but very freckled on the front but with kind of red hair on their heads and all the way down their backs
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah. And with hands that drag along the floor and they walk on both their feet and hands quite regularly, although they can walk on their hind legs as it were, but they've got a prehensile toe on their feet as well so that they tend to pass things up to their hands with. So in many ways they sounded much more gorilla-like
00:09:21
Speaker
although they've obviously got red hair rather than black hair, than as far as I'm aware that what we now think of as what Neanderthals look like, if you look at the Kennes Brothers reconstructions, for instance, at the Natural History Museum, looks a little bit different to that. Oh, totally. I mean, I've still got the copy of the inheritors that I had as a teenager. Yeah. It's got a picture on it of a figure
00:09:50
Speaker
that effectively looks like an ocean of pithycine if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't carrying fire. And as a teenager, this guided how I was going to imagine the Neanderthals as portrayed in this book and as Golding presents them. Golding is presenting them
00:10:08
Speaker
very similar to Marcellin Bull's conception. That's like late 19th century, isn't it? Exactly. And I think that is a huge influence in Golding's conception of the physicality. The colouring is absolutely radical for that point in time to imagine light skin and red hair and freckles. Now we know from the genetic information, these things are all perfectly
00:10:38
Speaker
I know. It's amazing, isn't it? That's amazing. It's coincidence, but it's insightful. Part of that, I think, comes from where apparently he situated the inheritance.
Human-Neanderthal Interactions
00:10:52
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Which wasn't in a far flung continent, but was in his environment of Wiltshire. He was very, apparently very specific. This was Sabernak Forest. Yeah.
00:11:07
Speaker
And the woods and the landscape he describes doesn't seem like a Savanac forest to me. There's waterfalls, there's rock shelters, but the forested beach forest, he says that. And yeah, so these are English Neanderthals he's talking about. So yeah, why shouldn't there be pale skinned and prickly?
00:11:27
Speaker
Exactly, just like so many English people. Well, people from Northern Europe anyway, but that is quite interesting. But it does have the modern humans as being light-skinned as well, because the Neanderthals, when they're trying to work out what these creatures are,
00:11:43
Speaker
think that there's bone above the eyes because it's a bit of white above the eyes and bone beneath the mouth because of course Neanderthals had much, well their forehead didn't rise in front of, did it? It kind of sloped back quite quickly, is that right? And slightly chinless as well, Neanderthals.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, they don't have a projecting chin on their lower jaw. Golding's taken these two kind of characterizations of Neanderthals as having, yes, no foreheads. And that's what Neanderthals are seeing most and being so striking about these strangers that have come into their world. It's very reflective parts of the
00:12:32
Speaker
of the face if they're not covered by a beard. But would those earliest humans, whether or not they'd got to England or first come into Europe, they would be dark-skinned, wouldn't they, at that point? Is that what the genetics are showing? Well, the earliest Homo sapiens to move into Eurasia would have almost certainly been dark-skinned, moving, as they did out from Africa. How quickly
00:13:01
Speaker
those populations lightened up in terms of their skin color would have depended on the degree of interbreeding with Neanderthals because they would have got genes for lighter skin. And also, if there was any selection pressure, moving north, shorter days, less sunlight in winter, a bit of deep deficiency would have become a selective pressure within anatomically modern humans.
00:13:29
Speaker
At this point in time though, if we're looking at, you know, if we want to situate this accurately in time. Yeah. So when would that be? Yeah. Well, were there any Neanderthals in Northern Europe by the time, by the time homo sapiens made it? We haven't got any evidence. That's the case. The place is where we got evidence for overlap.
00:13:47
Speaker
is of course the near east, southeast Europe, southern Europe, maybe up into central France. But certainly there's no clear evidence of overlap in northern Europe. But if we wanted to situate it, I guess this would be between 40 and 45,000 years ago, which is the times plan in which modern humans finally made it into northern Europe.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah. So it's unclear at the moment, but I did come across some research that had shown that even Mesolithic populations in Spain were still quite dark-skinned. But that might, I mean, of course, it might be the other things coming into the gene pool there. But I mean, in a way, this is just details, isn't it, about how people actually looked
00:14:38
Speaker
but if William Golding did say that he was trying to refute the idea put forward by an earlier writer who, H.G. Wells, yes about these primitive people and yet he hasn't got much further really in terms of the representation of them as shambling on. What do you think? Yeah, I think what he's trying to do here
00:15:04
Speaker
is separate that concept of primitiveness. It's not a word we use now, but I would imagine it's a word William Golding was using and trying to characterize that these are a primitive type of human. And another term that we don't use anymore, which is savagery.
00:15:24
Speaker
Because he's showing that the Neanderthals, while they are primitive, they are not savages, which is what H.T. Wells was trying to portray them as, cannibalistic and violent or more like. The savagery in the Neanderthal world is coming in. From the humans, yeah. The more humans, even though they are obviously technologically more superior.
00:15:44
Speaker
and cognitively more superior, they think in a completely different way. They're the ones who are bringing duplicitousness and real fear and violence into their world.
00:16:01
Speaker
So I think it's really interesting to try and think about how primitive, how ancient people were conceptualized in the past in the 1950s using this language of primitiveness and savagery, because that's what Golding really seems to be trying to pull apart here.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, so he was actually quite progressive in the view of the Neanderthals than you think. I mean, there are other issues though, aren't there? Because you know, because you study it, that they made stone tools of their own and pretty good stone tools that would do lots of really useful jobs. But possibly due to this lack of research that Golding had done,
00:16:45
Speaker
Oh, not done. He always presents them as using just naturally found flints. So there's one occasion where they go, they're not really going hunting because he portrays them as scavengers as well. And so they go and they find, quite early on in the book, they find the remains of an animal that had been killed by a cat, they think. It's a deer.
00:17:15
Speaker
And then they are confronted by a couple of hyenas that want to also take the deer. And Far, who is one of the female Neanderthals, has got natural blades of stone in either hand. And she jerks her right hand around and the stone thumps the bitch in the ribs. Sorry, this is the hyena bitch. So they're
00:17:39
Speaker
So again, and when they get to the deer, Fa uses her splinter of stone to slash at the deer and to skin it. And then they butcher it pretty expertly. But they're only using found stones. And obviously that's not... It's really interesting, isn't it? Because if we think about
00:18:07
Speaker
you know, maybe the some of the things that Golding may have come across in his just through his interest in prehistory. What he's actually presenting there is what would have been quite, which was quite an established idea in the late 19th century and early 20th century
00:18:25
Speaker
that in anticipating looking for the earliest stone tool technology, or use of stone tools, it would have been natural stones, minimally modified or used just as they are found in the landscape, that would have been the first stone tools used by early humans. And that's what led to the search, especially in Britain.
00:18:48
Speaker
for tertiary man, as they called it at the time.
Neanderthal Burial Practices
00:18:53
Speaker
You had people like Benjamin Harrison and Lewis Abbott and scouring the highest parts of the highest hills in southern Britain, looking for these things that they called eoliths, dawnstones. And eventually, you know, Piltdown Man, you know, Eoanthropus, the dawn man, is
00:19:12
Speaker
is by some interpreted as just using natural stone tools, which are found alongside them.
00:19:23
Speaker
This isn't a Neanderthal that's being presented here, but something far more primitive. It is of Western conceptions at the time. But was that the Piltdown Man then, was that already, was that exposed as a hoax already by the 1950s? It had been. 1953 it was exposed and this published in 1955, but I would imagine William Golding growing up. Yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
you know, he would have read the earliest Englishman, he would have, you know, put down man would, you know, the portrayals and the pictures of these early humans would have been what would have been coloring his conception of the past. There's nothing in here that makes me think that William Golding read a single thing about Neanderthals. I mean, the only thing that makes me think about it, I know we want to talk about it later, is the attempts at burial.
00:20:18
Speaker
And the size of, I don't know how many of them are there, sort of six, seven, eight. And the site of Le Ferrissey in France, where you've got, you know, eight or seven burials being found. So yeah, but very minimal, as he admits he hasn't done any research and it really comes through. Right, well, let's take a break then. And maybe we'll talk about burial when we get back then from the break.
00:20:47
Speaker
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00:21:27
Speaker
Hi we're back and I'm about to actually read out an extract from the book where we started talking about Neanderthal burial before the break and in the book so the the actual family group or extended family is Mal who is an elderly man and there is an old woman whose name we never find out because it's too powerful to know her name apparently
00:21:52
Speaker
And then we have, I think it feels like two couples, although it's never quite explicit, but there's Nil. Nil and Har, Nil is the female and Har is a male, and they seem to have a new baby who is also not named yet. And then there's Lock and Far, Lock is a male and Far is a female, and they, I have a feeling that Liku, who is a little girl, is theirs.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yes, that's what I think. But again, it's not really explicit. But Mal gets ill and then... After falling in the water. After falling in water. A little bit like an Austen heroine or something. Poor Mal. So they get to a rock shelter where they are staying for the summer, but Mal doesn't recover.
Themes of Civilization vs. Savagery
00:22:43
Speaker
And eventually he says, put me in the warm earth by the fire.
00:22:49
Speaker
And Locke, by this point already, Haar has disappeared. So Locke is the only fit adult male and it is his job to dig the grave. So, the old woman gave him a sharp splinter of bone from the dough meat and he found he could break up the surface much more easily with this. Underneath it was softer, the top layer of earth came up like slate but below it crumbled in his hands and he could scrape it out with a stone.
00:23:16
Speaker
So he continued as the moon moved. There came into his head the picture of a younger and stronger mal doing this, but on the other side of the hearth. The clay of the hearth was a bulging round on one side of the irregular shaped hole that he was digging. Soon he came to another hearth beneath it, and then another. There was a little cliff of burnt clay. Each hearth seemed thinner than the one above it, until as the hole deepens the layers were stone hard, and not much thicker than birch bark.
00:23:46
Speaker
So he keeps going and going and eventually he actually digs up other bones from previous burials on the site. And then they lay Mal in the grave and cover him up with earth, but I'm not entirely sure if he's dead by then. It seems like they bury him when he's still right at the end of his life.
00:24:06
Speaker
So it's a very affecting moment and actually it makes me think of excavating through the hearths and it's wonderful. It's an incredible passage and it's archeological isn't it? Yes it is, it really is. And I mean what's he trying to say there? He's trying to show that these people have been here. You know since the beginning there's that ancestry and there's the fact that the continuation of them, that signal getting smaller and smaller
00:24:37
Speaker
is they think this is the beginning. That's where some of this religious idea kind of comes in. There is a kind of like an Eden lightness to that. That's their original place and something dark has come in at that perfect place and that darkness is us.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's scary, in many ways very true. And that's where almost the niggles about the accurate portrayal of Neanderthals don't matter because it's about us, isn't it? Yeah, you know what I want to think about this? This is sequel to the Lord of the Flies, yeah? What does Lord of the Flies say? Okay, Lord of the Flies says, let's look at the most innocent part of our society, a bunch of kids, and let's take those kids a very long way away.
00:25:26
Speaker
and stick them without any authority and see what happens. They divide and they go wild and they become savages. And it just shows what a thin veneer civilization is. Because that's the third concept, the third elephant in the room in Golding's work, civilization. And that's about that dichotomy between savagery and civilization. Here, he said, well, let's not send things, you know, let's not situate this a long way away.
00:25:53
Speaker
you know, let's explore the idea of kind of like cognitive innocence, where you do not kill, where, you know, you were scavenging and, and actually look at that darkness that comes in with modern humans to look at it almost from, you know, 180 degrees the other way to Lord of Ice, I think, I think
00:26:13
Speaker
really two bits, two books that go together in that way. Yeah they do. I think you heard in that extract where he's trying to explain how they thought by saying they got a picture of something in their heads and this is a memory that they have and for some reason he also has them being telepathic and this was something that came up in Clan of the Cave Bear as well didn't it? It was for some reason
00:26:40
Speaker
Neanderthals get given almost magical powers when they're written about, which is weird. And it could be read as being slightly different here. And there's a kind of a tension because yes, it will say, you know, Locke has
00:26:59
Speaker
you know, calls up the picture of something that had in the past. And far sees the picture in his head. That's what you see. But maybe she's just reading his face and knows what he's thinking. Or sharing that memory. And they're both holding the same picture. So it's not necessarily telepathy in a kind of metaphysical sense.
00:27:21
Speaker
It's not necessarily telepathy, but it is magical in the way that they react to it. And there is something that Golding is trying to get over there that is magical. But it's almost as if their ability to use their imagination to call up pictures. And they're not all as good as using pictures as others are. Some have this talent more greatly developed than others. And the imagination in some
00:27:46
Speaker
is almost like a super magical power. But it's a cognitive function that we take for granted. It is magical, isn't it? But yeah, we do it so easily. And they beat their heads whilst they're trying to think of things, don't they? And it's like, yeah, I'm not entirely sure that was the case.
00:28:07
Speaker
I guess we shouldn't be surprised that a writer should be interested in seeing where this incredible thing, the human imagination, comes from and what it might be like not to have an imagination or just be on the edge of having imagination. And there's two things that are imagined that are really exciting. At one point, I think, is it Locke imagines water being held in shells?
00:28:30
Speaker
when they're trying to feed someone out of the skin bag. Yes, it is, isn't it? Because they see shells down at the sea where they've just come from. That's lock on the edge of an innovation. Right on the edge and then he loses it.
00:28:50
Speaker
And you think about the fire, there's only one of them using fire, the old lady. Yeah, and obviously, when she's gone and their fire has gone out, they seem to be completely lost. Yeah, she's the only one who knows how to do it. But we know that the Neanderthals were making fire, don't we? I mean, wasn't there some recent stuff that they used magnesium to help them make fires?
00:29:11
Speaker
There's magnesium found at sites where there are fires. I don't think the evidence has quite got to the point where you're using potassium. But this is where fiction is greater than fact, when we can actually make that leap and say, if you've got magnesium at a site, we're going to basically write the fact that they use magnesium to make fires. I mean... Yeah, bit of speculation going on. We need more specul... I love the speculation.
00:29:37
Speaker
But also the language as well. Obviously, Golding is really interested in how they communicate with each other and the way that they speak and
00:29:56
Speaker
is obviously it's not it's not exactly uh they do speak but there seems to be quite a lot of um hand gestures and jumping around and things as well to get across emotions and
Communication and Cognitive Abilities
00:30:09
Speaker
and things like that and kind of reacting through things
00:30:14
Speaker
Yes, the full body communication and performance. And yeah, it almost made me think of a bees waggle dance. You know, that's what it made me think of. It's also interesting, though, to be able to see their perception of when they're hearing humans talking. Yes. And because they don't know what they're hearing. And at one point, Locke thinks it sounds like laughter.
00:30:43
Speaker
And another point he describes it as something like... Birds twittering. Yeah, twittering. And then describes the little refrains as like weeds in a river, just drape in the water flow. So it's just like, I guess it's the babbling and the conversational tone. Yeah, kind of staccato kind of feel to it. Yeah.
00:31:07
Speaker
which is the alien sound in the forest. Well we should get to the humans really. So what happens in the book is that I don't want to give too many spoilers although I might have to because right at the end it's just it's horrific really and I think it's a really interesting thing to talk about. Anyway but
00:31:30
Speaker
So these, Haar goes missing, and they kind of have a feeling that he's not around anymore, because in the book Neanderthals have a great sense of smell as well, and they can smell when his scent runs out on the edge of a cliff, and so the thought is that he's gone over the edge of the cliff into the river.
00:31:51
Speaker
And there's these creatures on an island that the Neanderthals can't get to because they don't particularly like water or going in water, which is just, I guess, a literary, a kind of, what's the word, he's made that up to make it more
00:32:09
Speaker
A lot of primates don't like getting wet so maybe he needs something to do with that. So much for the aquatic ape.
00:32:24
Speaker
of these creatures. But then it becomes apparent that there's more than one. And he managed to follow the scent of one that has ended up going above their rock shelter and looking down on the Neanderthals without them seeing. And that's when Lotgo is very, very scared.
00:32:43
Speaker
Yes. Up until that point, he's quite excited. Yeah. But he does go still back to excitement because there's something really kind of attractive about these new humans as they repel as well. And I guess that's all the stuff that they've got. And he sees so and then they they come together and the humans sent him a gift. They sent him a twig with a with a sharp pointy thing on the end, which which misses him.
00:33:09
Speaker
Poison. Yeah, he smells the stone at the end and and it doesn't smell good but thankfully it's missed him and eventually so you you get to as the Neanderthals all end up being killed somehow then it's pretty nasty and he's he yeah he sees the old woman
00:33:34
Speaker
in the river, float past underneath his face as he's hanging over the river, trying to look at the new people. And then the new humans feel emboldened to come out into the open eventually. And you can see all the stuff that they've got. They've got boats, they've got clothes, they've got carrying equipment, they've got bows and arrows. What else have they got? Oh, yeah, they have tents. Obviously, they make art, which is a big thing for the Upper Paleolithic.
00:34:04
Speaker
uh they've got but they've got pots as well which rather spoilt it for me um and they've got alcohol i've forgotten about alcohol we're in toxic things yeah and it makes them behave in quite yeah as you say they're deceitful aren't they they um the modern humans are violent towards each other they're deceitful um they shout at each other they're
00:34:32
Speaker
power games going on yes absolutely and other people trying to force everybody to do something they don't want to do and all of this is so alien to the Neanderthals but it sounds sadly it's very it's very human
00:34:49
Speaker
But for all of that, for all of that technology, for all of the, yeah, they're scared. They are. And the violence comes from their fear of these strange creatures that they've come across. Because in a way, for them, the Neanderthals are like the predator. That's what they feel, these weird creatures who are different. Yeah.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, which makes you think that they'd never come across them before. Because one thing we know about these Neanderthals, and if all Neanderthal groups in William Golding's world are as innocent and refrain from violence and don't kill, if the modern humans had come across Neanderthals before, they would have known there was nothing to be scared about.
00:35:32
Speaker
well have wiped them out but they wouldn't have been scared but the fear is palpable and the violence comes from fear here so this is a first contact. Which as you say does seem strange for it being said in England but I mean if you imagine that it could be anywhere couldn't it where modern humans came into contact with Neanderthals all with another human species.
00:35:53
Speaker
Well, that's, that's the thing that this may be more of an analogy of if we, if we leave aside Neanderthals, then what about humans and Homo floriensis or humans, maybe surviving Homo erectus or, you know, other, other surviving lineages, some of which may have been quite
00:36:11
Speaker
and quite ancient and quite different to modern demons. And also, of course, there's an analogy with different groups of the Homo sapiens species coming into contact with each other and what can happen there as well.
Post-WWII Context of Golding's Writing
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah. And this is the other thread that, you know, why is William Golding in the 1950s writing Lord of the Flies? Why is he writing this book? He's writing it for the same reason that
00:36:39
Speaker
Primo Levy is writing, and Herman Hess is writing, and Aldous Huxley is writing, or Milgram's carrying out psychological experiments. Everyone's trying to make sense of what's just happened within the last decade. How can humans be so savage and barbaric to other humans? Where in our wonderful civilization does this violence come from that creates these divisions? So I think this is a
00:37:09
Speaker
great mid-century modernist novel for that reason. And it is so much more about our position now, although that of course has its roots in the deep past, but it's rather than being about and actually about Neanderthal human interaction. I could disentangle this in my head, maybe it's because it's also published by Faber and Faber from T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland.
00:37:38
Speaker
sort of an attempt to try and work out what sits at the heart of humanity and its dark. Fear and miscommunication and misunderstanding. So I reread this recently for this podcast and I stopped reading at a certain point towards the end of the book because I just had this feeling of dread
00:38:04
Speaker
building up and dread because what happens is the Neanderthals do sorry the modern humans kill most of the Neanderthals but they steal the children. Yeah. And lock and far are left alive far just barely actually and they plan to rescue the children.
00:38:24
Speaker
and they are hiding in a tree above the clearing where the modern humans have come into interview finally in the book and Locke is exhausted and goes to sleep and far keeps on watching what happens when these modern humans who seem to not be very good at hunting actually because they come back empty-handed from the forest and they're all hungry but they do have alcohol
00:38:47
Speaker
So they get really drunk and then someone has a bright idea of something that they could eat. So you can see where this is going. So instead of having the Neanderthals as being the cannibals, it's the modern humans and they kill and eat Liku, the little girl. And it's horrific. I mean, he doesn't describe it how you find out later because Locke finds out later. Because by going back to the site and scrabbling around in the
00:39:17
Speaker
in the earth under the fire. It's actually really horrible to describe. It's horrific. It's like a Game of Thrones moment, isn't it? Yes, it is. It is like the Red Wedding. Yeah, it's horrendous. And it's just the way that he manages to hold off from telling you, William Golding, because you see it through the eyes of Locke, who doesn't understand what's happened. He missed it, far watched it, far
00:39:44
Speaker
doesn't tell him she just looks at him when he says we're going to rescue Liku and it just sounds bad. It's just awful. Yeah, I think parts of the book like that because you're seeing everything with thought processes and there's a wonderful intellectual or even poetic game here that Golding's playing and trying to portray everything through the eyes of the Neanderthals that you always think
00:40:06
Speaker
You know, did I read that right? And you have to go back and read it several times to actually piece together what's happening, which is, of course, what both sides are doing in the novel the whole time, trying to work out what the hell is going on.
Genetic Legacy and Human Fascination with Neanderthals
00:40:22
Speaker
Yeah, so it's pretty nasty. I mean obviously we do know, we don't know actually for sure whether modern humans killed Neanderthals, do we? Because it's very unusual, it's very rare to find the bones of Neanderthals anyway and then even if we do it's very rare to find any pathology on those bones.
00:40:44
Speaker
that will show any violent violence at all. There's a clip from Shanadar. There's a rib injury that seems to come from a punctuant in the rib cage, I think.
00:41:02
Speaker
They've estimated that the velocities to cause that would have needed something to be thrown as opposed to stabbed. And so it was suggested that maybe this was a wound from a modern human. Again, it's an interpretation that is built on so much speculation. I don't hold much witness with it. But did modern humans kill Neanderthals? Yes, I'm sure they did. Did Neanderthals kill modern humans?
00:41:27
Speaker
Yes, they did, I'm sure, given we're dealing with such a wide contact zone, and potentially tens of thousands of years of overlap in particular regions. Yes, of course, violence was in there, but the interesting thing is to think about what else happened alongside, in addition to violent encounters.
00:41:48
Speaker
Well, exactly, because there's so much more evidence now for interbreeding, isn't there, in the genetic evidence? It does have to be non-violent. Oh, yeah, that's true. But it seems to be quite, quite, there's quite a lot of it going on, which would give rise to so much DNA. Is that right? Or it wouldn't just be a single isolated, you know, intercourse? Well, in order to really understand, you know, how much interbreeding is occurring, we need to really understand
00:42:18
Speaker
how many episodes and centers of gene flow there is and how big Neanderthal populations are. If Neanderthal populations and human populations at the time are both relatively small, then a relatively small number of interactions can translate into a relatively large amount of genetic flow. But it's probably happening more than once. We know in
00:42:47
Speaker
in Southeast Europe, we've got one DNA sample from a modern human that suggests within just a few generations previously, there was an interaction, interbreeding episode. Starting to get the fine grain of roughly when these
00:43:07
Speaker
interactions happened. Because of course it's still quite an early science really to look at these preserved genomes from Neanderthals and early humans isn't it? So there's still a lot to be found out. Now we're going to take a little break again and then when we come back we'll try and be a bit slightly bit more upbeat.
00:43:39
Speaker
Archaeology and Ale is a free monthly talk presented by Archaeology in the City from the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department. That's where the archaeology part of Archaeology and Ale comes from. As for the ale part, the talk is held upstairs at the Red Deer, a great local pub on Pitt Street in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, on the last Thursday of every month.
00:43:59
Speaker
If you're in Sheffield, do come along, and don't worry, non-ale alternatives are also available. If you can't make it to Sheffield, never fear. You can listen to the Archaeology and Ale Talk every month, right here on the Archaeology Podcast Network. And now, back to the show.
00:44:20
Speaker
Okay so to finish on a slightly more upbeat note, we do have a fascination with Neanderthals don't we? I mean on my podcast I think we've done The Clown of the Cave Bear, we've done Stig of the Dump and now The Inheritors. I can't think of another one which is specifically about Neanderthals but there are lots and lots more books out there about them
00:44:41
Speaker
And for children as well, Little Nose the Hunter, for instance, which I might talk about at some point. Why is it that we're so fascinated with Neanderthals? I guess they're the other, aren't they? They are, if we want to actually look from the scientific record for another type of human that existed and is close to us, then the Neanderthals provide it. There are another
00:45:09
Speaker
way of being human. And that's got to be fascinating. I think originally the fascination from the Neanderthals came from thinking, are these our ancestors? Are these telling us about where we came from? Moved away from that. It was a long period of time where we thought Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end. And then the focus became, why did they go extinct? Now we realize they have a long evolution. They're around for 400,000 years.
00:45:37
Speaker
They overlap with us, meaning they're closer to us. They're not so much of a different species that we can't integrate. It means we probably could share ideas as well as genetic information. But for all of the diversity of humanity on the planet, the one thing we've lost in terms of diversity are rather genetic populations at the species level. But for most of the human experience,
00:46:06
Speaker
millions of years, there were lots of different populations or human populations. And that's something that's lost now.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah. And it's difficult to imagine, but it does come down to that link because it reflects on us, doesn't it? And it reflects on the way that we interact with everybody. And the genetic variants in human populations today, even though there's so much difference on the surface, is tiny, isn't it? Because we all came from a very small population. But
00:46:40
Speaker
Yeah, to have come across some other humans must have been quite an amazing thing. I mean, there's two ways we can now think about the disappearance of those other species. Before we had, you know, we were failing on their own terms, because, you know, they weren't as well adapted to the planet as we were, which I think, you know, now we largely dismiss, or
00:47:05
Speaker
they were encountering us and some kind of global genocide took place, which I think has been sidelined now. Now it looks more like a numbers game. Modern humans are networkers. They're a population that thrives at times, it expands out, it has connections. It's obviously having connections with some of these other populations they're finding. And there's a degree of assimilation now. That diversity has been assimilated
00:47:33
Speaker
into modern humans. And modern humans, if we contain the DNA of these other species, what is a modern human these days? We're not just a population that moved out of Africa and stayed the same. We actually were transformed by our interactions with these other populations.
00:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And really the Neanderthals and other populations still live on in us. So we are the Neanderthals really as well, which I quite like. We're the inheritors of that. We are the inheritors, yeah.
00:48:10
Speaker
This is a good point. So at the end of the book, we finally find out the names of these modern humans with... From their point of view, as well. From their point of view, yes, because... And Lochte is the only surviving Neanderthal from this encounter, sadly. And, sorry, I should have said spoiler alert before I said that.
00:48:32
Speaker
and he is turned into the creature that they have been seeing and then we see all of these people who are Tuami and Vivani and Marlon and they've taken the baby, they've taken the Neanderthal baby who they think is hilarious and it's almost a pet really although one of the women is feeding it
00:48:55
Speaker
as well, is breastfeeding it. And you think that that, so he has left that door open for Neanderthal contribution to the future in some way, although you feel that maybe they'd get tired of it once it was on. You've got to be worried for that kid. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. With what they did to Leko. But there's that human paradox, isn't there? You know, the fact that if we moved into it, if humans move into a new environment and there's wolves there,
00:49:24
Speaker
You try and kill the wolves, but you might keep the wolf cub. And that may be one of the ways in which wolves became domesticated, that we will fawn over a lamb.
00:49:34
Speaker
But when it's a few years older, we will eat it. I mean, there is this psychotic paradox that humans have that we're capable of killing animals. We're also capable of showing great care and developing deep relationships with it. And he's got it right there. They wiped out the whole of the tribe. But this child, at the point we leave it, is being nursed by and looked after by a very
00:50:03
Speaker
I'm sure influenced by, you know, Paleolithic female figurines in, I forget the name of the... Oh, yes, because he describes her as being quite Vivani, I think it is, and he describes her as being quite fat. She's clearly a matriarch of some description, yeah. And she's got power in the group as well, and she's taken this child, and she's going to look after it, and that child survived because
Neanderthal Innovation and Beliefs
00:50:25
Speaker
of that. It's coming to her protection, which is odd when you think of the other religious thread that the Neanderthals have.
00:50:38
Speaker
Yes. I could never quite get my head around what they were talking about. What was it? Was it an icicle? I don't know. I think it was because... Yeah, I think it was behind and obviously it's in the summer that would all unfreeze and then freeze again. So it's some kind of ice cave with these hanging pendulous icicles that look like females and Liku has a little root that looks like a female figure, doesn't it?
00:50:55
Speaker
is that they venerate a mother goddess, don't they?
00:51:03
Speaker
So it reminded me of something that, you know, had only been discovered in the 1990s. So again, one of these little bits of kind of almost psychic prescience of what the show they were there is that stalagmite, yes, that has been turned into the lower half of a female by, in that case, you know, probably graffiti and all. Yeah. So yeah, I've got this image of this,
00:51:28
Speaker
slightly female-like icicle hanging down by the waterfall. The Neanderthals that William Golden portrays are very much a paradox. They have some religious leanings, they have scruples over killing animals, and yet they're not able to think. It feels like a strange dichotomy, but I guess it's difficult to actually piece together the
00:51:56
Speaker
fishing at their limits. Yeah, yeah. You get the feeling if they hadn't been wiped out, that group could have gone somewhere that Locke could have translated that idea into creating containers. And at one point he thinks about the food, the plants growing by the... I know, I know. And planting them, he almost thinks of farming, yeah. Totally. So, you know, there's seeds of hope that they would have gone on and transformed themselves.
Success and Adaptability of Neanderthals
00:52:24
Speaker
But then, yeah. Yeah.
00:52:26
Speaker
they meet the new kids on the block and it doesn't go well. No, it all goes wrong. Sorry, this is going to be the upbeat bit. We can't do a post-war novel about innocence and savagery. You can't really. Well, thank you so much, Matt. It's been brilliant to talk to you and I hope that we can talk again. Because there are so many books set in the Paleolithic, I'm sure we will.
00:52:53
Speaker
I look forward to it, Ken. All right, lovely. Thank you very much.
00:53:02
Speaker
And now I welcome Becky Scott from the British Museum and the Ancient Human Origins Project. Hello, Becky. Hello, how are you? Yeah, very good, yes. And now we had problems getting together, didn't we, on Skype and you've broken your elbow or your shoulder? My shoulder, I thought. So thank you so much for gritting your teeth through the pain to talk to me.
00:53:25
Speaker
Not a problem. Not a problem at all. Yeah, I'm glad we were able to work this out. Thank you. And we've talked before, so it was so lovely to talk to you last time about Stig of the Dump. And this book kind of treads... Well, no, it's so far away from Stig of the Dump, isn't it? It's The Inheritors. Although it does have Neanderthals meeting humans, it's set in the time where they actually would have met. And the outcome is completely different.
00:53:55
Speaker
It's not really a children's adventure story, let's put it that way. But I mean, obviously, you like me and the child quite a lot, don't you? I do. And actually, both books, Stick in the Dump and This, are books that I read when I was very young. I think I must have been 12 or 13 when I first read The Inheritors. And it's been really interesting reading it again now.
00:54:20
Speaker
Yeah and I've enjoyed it just as much but I've got quite a different perspective on it so yeah. I mean your focus of research is mainly on how Neanderthals evolved in the first place isn't it? So what's the kind of process where they came from and when we can actually pinpoint whether they're Neanderthals is that right?
00:54:39
Speaker
Yeah, and the real process by which Neanderthals came to act in the ways that we consider to be Neanderthals. So actually, I quite often joke and say that as far as I'm concerned, the least interesting thing that Neanderthals did was actually die out. And I always try to avoid talking about Neanderthal extinction as much as possible because it sort of puts the emphasis
00:55:06
Speaker
on their disappearance and almost presents them like a failure but also they were really successful species and that's what's more interesting well they were around for longer than we've been around weren't they yes yes they were and they were surviving in you know incredibly taxing
00:55:24
Speaker
cold conditions, not just as icy as it was yesterday as I went over the ice, but you know you're talking Linford and Norfolk, the beetle evidence there suggests that they're dealing with winter temperatures of sort of getting down to minus 12 degrees.
00:55:42
Speaker
They're extremely capable and well equipped and well adapted to these environments, not just phenotypically, not in terms of their body form so much as what they do, their behaviours. So I see them as a successful species. They just don't happen to be around as modern humans are today.
00:56:06
Speaker
this is it. But I think so much in books about them aimed at the lay audience, I guess, but also in storybooks, it's this fascination with us meeting them, isn't it?
Neanderthals as a Reflection of Human Nature
00:56:22
Speaker
And it's all about us. It's not really about them at all. It's all about us.
00:56:29
Speaker
Yeah, they're treated as a mirror, you know, they're either there to show us up as how great we are, or how evil we are, you know, they are
00:56:40
Speaker
foil, you know, I think writers use them as our bestial other, if you see what I mean. And actually some of that comes from the academic writing. I mean, you look back at the sort of texts that I was working from, you know, when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s.
00:57:02
Speaker
You even look at a book like Stringer and Gamble's book on the Neanderthals from that period and it really gives them quite a hard time. It's almost like they are teleologically compromised, they're automatically going to go extinct the moment that humans appear. And of course that's fed through.
00:57:23
Speaker
into what people are writing, have been writing, it'll be really interesting to see, you know, whether when writers today start playing around with the Neanderthals and especially these periods now where we seem to see Neanderthals and modern humans interacting in ways that were never considered previously, it'll be interesting to see what modern writers do with that, and whether they can be a bit more imaginative rather than fall back on the same old stereotypes.
00:57:49
Speaker
Well that's it because so much has come out more recently about how the two species interbred that it's slightly changed the rhetoric on Neanderthals hasn't it about them being so savage and bestial like you say and there's a lot more out there, we haven't seen it in books yet because I can't think of any modern books set in this period but
00:58:15
Speaker
you know like fiction books but in um new stories in the paper and stuff like that it's um there's much more focus on them as as just another type of human and how much how how human they are how much like us they are absolutely and that's finally filtering through and i think you know there's stuff like the
00:58:36
Speaker
the stories that are coming out of Gibraltar for instance and things like that are finally getting through into what journalists know about Neanderthals and people are really proud you know there's a lot of talk about what contribution Neanderthal DNA may be within the modern human genome
00:58:59
Speaker
and one thing I found fascinating is that's what people want you know people would be proud you know when you taught people they'd be really proud to know just how Neanderthal they were and it you know it's really become a source of sort of pride for some people. It has I think that's lovely and the stuff in Gibraltar you were saying is that the art the potential art that that Neanderthal's made
00:59:25
Speaker
Yes, which I mean, it's still somewhat equivocal. I haven't seen it for myself, so it's very difficult to judge, but the excavators have been doing experimental work and the number of, you know, sort of separate strikes necessary to create those scratches, you know, it's quite an involved process and reading what they've said about the placement
00:59:50
Speaker
within the cave of that and all the rest of it as well is really intriguing but what really fascinates me from from Gibraltar is the use of the bird feathers which is beautiful and sort of
01:00:06
Speaker
you know brings to mind Mardi Gras and things like that if you want to totally let your imagination go wild. Yeah so mostly raptors it's so kind of obviously eagles and hawks. Yeah it's raptors and it's corvids as well. So crows and things. Crows, kites as well. So they think what might be going on is that they're actually
01:00:29
Speaker
leaving a carcass there to attract raptors and to attract carrionators and then they're catching the birds who've come down for the carriage specifically to extract the feathers, the long primary feathers.
01:00:47
Speaker
And it's fascinating, I mean they're understanding that behaviour to do that and but also that presumably means some sort of trapping technology that we're not seeing you know. Yeah well yeah that would be interesting but of course it could easily be made out of something very perishable so it wouldn't survive.
01:01:06
Speaker
This is obviously very different to the way Neanderthals are presented in William Golding's Inheritors, but it was written in the 1950s and so a lot of this research obviously you wouldn't know about it all.
Sympathetic Portrayal and Academic Views
01:01:23
Speaker
He himself said that he was trying to update the old idea of them as being very ape-like.
01:01:31
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting that because what really comes, it's a very, very sympathetic picture of the Neanderthals and it's a very emotional, you know, you're there with them as they are confused by these peculiar beings, you know, and as they lose members of their small group, you know, it's cripplingly sad. It really, really is.
01:01:59
Speaker
Absolutely heart-wrenching. It is quite a bleak, yeah. But at the same time, it's interesting that, so his Neanderthals still stoop, so they're still running stooped over. Yeah, with knuckles on the floor. With knuckles on the floor. They're covered in red hair.
01:02:18
Speaker
you know, they're described as red devils at one point, by the people who we presume are modern humans who they meet, you know, or could they be Denisovans, you know, who are these strange individuals who they're interacting with. Yeah.
01:02:33
Speaker
So yeah, it's fascinating. It's very much of its time. So they're still, they are still quite bestial. There's little things like you don't really, he doesn't really write about them using tools much. They sort of drag around these thorn bushes.
01:02:48
Speaker
Yes, I was talking about this to Matt earlier and Far, who is one of the women Neanderthals, was using just found stone tools, wasn't she? So there are moments where, and this links to this kind of idea of an eolith which has mostly been
01:03:11
Speaker
discounted now but people would look out for these stones that could have been used as a chopper or something like that but had not been modified by any human species and said oh there you go there's an earliff. Yeah but I mean it's so different too you know the very complex and complicated technologies that we we know that the late Neanderthals
01:03:35
Speaker
But it's interesting that even then, that Neanderthal tool use isn't feeding into Golding's impression of the Neanderthals, because of course the 1950s is, you know, the time of boards and those typologies, which are very definitely dealing with the Middle Paleolithic, so yeah.
01:03:58
Speaker
fascinating. It is but again as we know he probably didn't do very much research although he was interested in this period so he'd been reading about it but probably nothing systematic. No. Clearly.
01:04:14
Speaker
I'm quite interested because they're fascinated by what these modern humans, or whatever they are, draw on the ground, aren't they? So these modern humans at one point draw a picture of a deer on the ground with coloured sand or something like that, or ochre probably it is, isn't it? And twigs and a little stone and they create a picture of a deer on the ground.
01:04:41
Speaker
and to the Neanderthals this is magical. Now even in today's discussions around that art at Gibraltar and the use of the feathers, there is the suggestion that these late Neanderthals were learning these things from modern humans. What do you think about that?
01:05:05
Speaker
I never understand why people would assume that. It just seems to me to be a logical fallacy to considering the trajectory of change we see within the Neanderthals generally.
01:05:21
Speaker
Why automatically assume that something, you know, that changes you see towards the end of that long and deep process, and necessarily to do with contact, it just it just seems very, very peculiar to me, really odd, really odd. I mean, there are there are things in Laney and at all, lithic technology that seem to bespeak people
01:05:47
Speaker
thinking about making tools in certain ways. So late Neanderthal bifacial tools look different in different parts of Europe. So in Britain, we get this classic form with a flat bottom and a D shaped tip, which is called a boot coupé.
01:06:05
Speaker
In France, you get these triangular hand axes. Heading eastwards a bit, you get these weird sort of things with bent tips, sort of keel-messer things and stuff like that. So in these groups of tools that look a particular way,
01:06:25
Speaker
you get this real sense that for those groups of Neanderthals, that meant something, you know, there's an aesthetic sense there, there's almost emblematic style, there's some sort of signaling about identity and belonging. I see that as very much
01:06:45
Speaker
on the same track as signaling your individual identity, you know, using beads or something like that, using toggles, you know, sort of thinking about the RC securing material, which is often thought of as being a contact phenomena, you know, Neanderthals starting to use, use signaling of some sort. So yeah, it's weird, we seem to be so fixated on
01:07:12
Speaker
this end game and meeting modern humans that we can't actually stand back and think, okay, let's just think about these as people. I know. Yeah, it's weird. If we go back in time a little bit then and think about
01:07:28
Speaker
the evolution of Neanderthals. One of the things that is often talked about is whether or not they have language, isn't it? And of course for earlier species as well, because I took part in an experiment for Corey Stade, who is at the University of Southampton.
01:07:45
Speaker
doing a PhD in how early humans taught each other to make these tools and we were either given a full kind of workshop with talking and explanation or some people were just shown without any language at all and they had to pick it up from just seeing it in silence and other things that she did there.
01:08:13
Speaker
As a way to almost test whether or not people were able, people actually had language in those early species, both Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis, I think she was going back to as well. Maybe early species, I'm not sure.
Neanderthal Language and Communication
01:08:28
Speaker
We'll have to see her thesis when it comes out. So what's your feeling about Neanderthal's language capabilities?
01:08:39
Speaker
It's funny because this one of this one about language again is something that really used to come up a lot in the 90s so I remember there being a lot of debate about whether Neanderthals had a high orchard bone to do with speech and I actually remember being told that Neanderthals probably could speak
01:09:01
Speaker
But if they did, then by the time they got to the end of a sentence, they'd have forgotten what they were saying at the beginning. And I won't tell you who was teaching at Cambridge in the mid-1990s, but he said this to us. But yeah, there are things about Neanderthal hunting that to me suggest that people are communicating.
01:09:30
Speaker
in quite complicated ways. How they organise their technology in the landscape suggests that there's a real geographic sense of where particular places are that needs you to have the sort of grammar that allows you to refer to things that are distant.
01:09:50
Speaker
in time and space so in terms of syntax that's not just simple you know verbal cues to something that's in front of you that's thinking about
01:10:01
Speaker
you know, somewhere that you have to travel to. So the work we're doing in Jersey, for instance, when it was cold, it would have been a site sort of set overlooking a wide coastal plain, the site of La Cote de Saint Bernard, leading out to what's now the Channel River. And you see people journeying to this place using a transported toolkit. So the flint they pick up
01:10:27
Speaker
the seabed and then they rework this and carry it with them presumably over several days to reach the cots so they're not
01:10:37
Speaker
just wandering around, this is sort of a logistical journey to a certain place and you're equipped to go there. And again and again. Yeah, and repeatedly, you know, for hundreds and thousands of years, and to do this, you need the sort of language that means you can share map concepts, distance concepts. So I think, you know, certainly the handle tools
01:11:03
Speaker
almost certainly heidel against this, because none of these things sort of come on like a light switch at any particular point in time, you know, these are gradual accretionary processes. And I think the process of becoming a Neanderthal is just as complicated as the process of becoming a modern human being, if you see what I mean, yeah.
01:11:27
Speaker
Yeah, it does seem weird to think about them not being able to speak to each other when they are doing such complex, they have got such complex behaviour otherwise.
01:11:41
Speaker
I mean really it must be even earlier when people start making tools really that you've got some kind of language and of course it's a continuum anyway isn't it because you can easily see that apes communicate with each other quite easily. Absolutely and obviously one of the arguments about the evolution of social language is that it's actually something linked to
01:12:08
Speaker
an earlier explosion in the need to sort of look after social relationships and have bigger social networks. So if you're talking about an ape stage, you might be talking about physically grooming each other as a way of servicing social relationships. But
01:12:29
Speaker
But one argument is that language comes into its own because it allows you to service several social relationships at any one time. You don't necessarily need that one to one moment. You can talk one to many.
01:12:48
Speaker
and therefore service a number of relationships like that. And I ask, yeah. And the end result of that is, you know, you can put a tweet out and, you know, hundreds and thousands of people might say, isn't it? It's an discretionary process. Well, on that note, we've come right bang up today. We're going to just take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to ask Becky what the difference was between reading this book as a child and reading it today.
Re-reading 'The Inheritors' as an Adult
01:13:21
Speaker
Hi, I'm back with Becky Scott talking about The Inheritors by William Golding. So you said you read this when you were about 12 or 13 for the first time. And what was your impression of it then?
01:13:34
Speaker
What I remember taking from it was I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And one of the reasons I loved it is that I think just generally, emotionally, I'm someone who's born on the side of the underdog sort of thing. So it was a beautiful book from that perspective because you're with them. And you really feel for this Neanderthal group odd though they are.
01:14:03
Speaker
What was interesting reading it now was that emotion is just as strong and it's beautifully written, but the oddities, the things that are very much of their time jump out. So things like that, Golding writes about the Neanderthals has been covered in
01:14:27
Speaker
covered in red hair, for instance, which again is something that comes out of those sort of 1950s reconstructions. They're not carrying tools. So it's almost like.
01:14:40
Speaker
I don't know what I've learned since I was 12 or 13, almost gets in the way of my enjoyment of it to a certain extent, but it still is heartbreaking, I have to say. There's some really lovely moments actually that jump out despite that. So there's one point where they're talking about having seen these other people
01:15:04
Speaker
and and they say people always understand people and then they all agree with each other by shaking their heads and I just thought that was such a beautiful little moment because of course of course we'd nod our heads in agreement and it was this idea yeah people always understand people and they shake their heads so they're doing the opposite and they just thought little things like that were really lovely. It's a good point actually I thought that he really was doing it just to show how
01:15:34
Speaker
but to show how different they were but actually when you think about it he was saying that they're definitely not gonna, that was a marker for what would come next which was that they really weren't going to understand each other. They really weren't going to understand each other, yeah. Oh dear, it is quite a heartbreaking book at the end and yeah but would you recommend people read this book?
01:15:59
Speaker
I absolutely would as much as anything because it's so interesting to look at continuities and differences in the way we thought about our closest relatives and ourselves so.
01:16:14
Speaker
So one theme that keeps coming out from the book is this idea of the Neanderthal sharing pictures. So a thought is described as being a picture, almost a static image in their heads, but they're also described as sharing pictures in some weird, telepathic way.
01:16:36
Speaker
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, it's a long time since I read Clan of the Cavemen. Oh yeah, she does the same thing in that. She does a similar sort of thing, doesn't she? But I was talking about this to Matt as well, he picked up on that and I think that in many ways you can share what's in someone's head if you know body language enough or if you're close enough to that person, can't you?
Magic and Historical Interpretation in Fiction
01:17:01
Speaker
You can actually, it's not quite telepathy but you can tell from the way that somebody is
01:17:06
Speaker
When you knew them so well, yeah. It's almost like that. And of course, if they've got shared memories, because they were both there, then the same things will remind you, won't they? Yeah, that's interesting. I'd be interested to follow this up actually, because with this being picked up, you know, a bit later in the 1970s, in a similar sort of way, in Clan of the Cave Fair,
01:17:32
Speaker
Is she picking that idea up from Golding or was there someone who I've never come across writing archaeologically at the time? I think in Clan of a Cave Bear it's much more explicitly a shared
01:17:48
Speaker
cultural memories and they can almost take each other back in time and hear about their own evolution which is really weird and it may well just be a literary device to show how Neanderthals evolved but it's a bit of a strange one that.
01:18:09
Speaker
But maybe it's part of this, sadly, I hate to say this, but it's part of this kind of speciesist view of Neanderthals that you ascribe magical powers to them because wasn't that something that was done in the 19th century with, say, African people that they were often seen as magically scary and doing weird things that nobody was able to do, nobody else, just because
01:18:37
Speaker
basically of that unknown the othering of them. Yeah othering other people isn't it ascribing things to them that are unfamiliar and unsettling. Yeah no that's true that makes sense as well yeah. Which is quite sad and it should be maybe I mean I know that
01:19:03
Speaker
In fiction books, obviously, in a particularly certain prehistory, there is a tendency to invoke magic all the time. I mean, there is in Wolf Brother and there is in Mesolith, which I hope to be talking about. And I know that that's, that's fun. And, you know, it makes it interesting and everything. But and I love fantasy books, I really do. But somehow, it seems like a bit of a cop out when you're actually talking about real people doing real things.
01:19:30
Speaker
and magic. Magic could, they could be thinking that they're wielding magic. But I hate to think it doesn't, it doesn't really exist. But so many people still do believe in it, I suppose, don't they? Yeah. Or I mean, I'm sort of thinking about ethnographies and things that I've looked at. So you look at some ethnographies about how people
01:19:58
Speaker
experience acting as an an animal in the hunt and talking to prey animals you know that people are almost treading a liminal line between belief and acting and being and it's really interesting to look at those transition points because they tell you a lot about
01:20:27
Speaker
people's cosmology, but also have the experience the world. So I've read a fascinating ethnography recently, in which the Western academic, who went and, you know, worked with these hunters and went out on the hunt, experienced the same things, you know, experience the same relationship with, or his version of the same relationship with
01:20:51
Speaker
the prey animals through immersion in that context and in that context that the thing that you know we describe as magic is real so yeah. Yeah that's a good point yeah. But I think with them with the the sharing memories thing and the sharing pictures in the inheritors
01:21:13
Speaker
It's, it's interesting that it's a writer doing that in that context, because it's almost like pictures are simple and words are hard. So it's, again, it's part of that other, you know, that slightly. And a cultural supremacy in a way. Yes. Yeah. So they're having to put this across in a simple static picture.
01:21:38
Speaker
they can't explain, elaborate, you know, talk around this as a writer does. So yeah, it's maybe part of that too. Well, yes, some interesting themes coming out of this book, definitely. But it's still well worth a read, I think. I'm going... I'm certainly recommending it, yes. I enjoyed reading
Conclusion and Farewells
01:22:00
Speaker
it again.
01:22:00
Speaker
Well I'm going to put some links to some of the things that we've talked about in the podcast notes, the show notes, so there'll be links to articles on the use of corvid and raptor feathers and the art in Gibraltar and if there's anything else that my guests remind me of I'll put it on there as well. But thank you so much Becky, I'm so glad we got to talk.
01:22:27
Speaker
Yes, thank you, Kim. And thank you for prodding me to read it again, because it was a real pleasure. Oh, you're welcome. Well, I really enjoyed reading it for a second time as well. And yeah, I hope your shoulder heals well. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, we'll hopefully speak soon.
01:22:56
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and edited by Chris Sims.
01:23:14
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeopodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeopodcastnetwork.com
01:23:37
Speaker
If you like this podcast, you may be interested in other podcasts that focus on the humanities. In fact, if you search Twitter for the hashtag Humanities Podcast, you'll find plenty of shows on history, language, literature, philosophy, art, and more. These podcasts are by people who enjoy telling stories, exploring the arts in our world, and who want to share that knowledge.
01:24:00
Speaker
Some examples of podcasts you'll find are The Endless Knot, an in-depth podcast featuring history, etymology, and all-around fun facts about a different topic every episode. The Story Behind, a short narrative podcast featuring the extraordinary history of ordinary objects, people or places, or the Archaeology Podcast Network, which features a variety of podcasts focusing on archaeology.
01:24:25
Speaker
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