Cavemen wrote no words, but plenty of words have been written about them — and not just by scientists and anthropologists who seek to understand the history of our species. Artists have tried to imagine the caveman’s long-lost world, and their work is the subject of a new book by University of Regina professor Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel. Ruddick recently took questions from NRO’s John J. Miller. JOHN J. MILLER: We’ve all heard about science fiction. You’ve written a whole book about a genre of literature called “prehistoric fiction.” What is pre-fi? NICHOLAS RUDDICK: Novels and stories about people who lived before history, i.e., before the invention of writing about 6,000 years ago. Basically, it’s fiction about cavemen. Most of it is set during the Stone Age, which lasted about 2.5 million years (and continues to this day in some jurisdictions). By the way, in my book I call prehistoric fiction “pf” for short. Your “pre-fi” suggests a neat parallel with “sci-fi.” The thing is, though, people who take science fiction seriously usually prefer “sf.” They reserve “sci-fi” for Hollywood blockbusters involving light sabers and heavy breathing.

MILLER: Have it your way. When it comes to pf, why have authors wanted to dabble in it, as opposed to writing novels about suburban ennui or zombies or something? RUDDICK: If you’re interested in making plausible speculations about the destiny of the human species, you’d write science fiction rather than realism in the vein of Updike and Cheever. And if you’re interested in hominization, i.e., how we became human, you’d write pf rather than antebellum bodice rippers or poignant sagas about gender-conflicted vampires. MILLER: When authors write about cavemen, are they really writing about cavemen — or are they actually writing about modern people? RUDDICK: That’s a very good question — so good, in fact, that I’m going to avoid giving a straight answer. Clearly, when we read fiction for anything more than pure escapism, we want the characters we identify with to reflect our present concerns. So in that sense, the cavemen in good pf are really modern people in animal skins. But there’s evidence that what scientists would call mentally modern human beings have been around for at least 50,000 years, while humans who are indistinguishable from ourselves in the physiological sense have been around for much longer than that. So you could say that most good pf is about people who lived a very long time ago but probably weren’t very different from ourselves. However, there’s an added issue raised by your “cavemen.” Though some early modern-type humans such as the Cro-Magnons may have lived partially in caves, it was the Neanderthals who were habitual cave dwellers. And geneticists have now established with some certainty that the Neanderthals were not our direct ancestors. As for why our beetle-browed first cousins became extinct, well, that’s pf’s favorite topic. MILLER: Are there any truly great works of fiction about prehistoric people? RUDDICK: Yes, there’s one: William Golding’s The Inheritors. It deals with the favorite topic I just referred to. You have to read everything in it several times, as it takes a while to get used to seeing the world through Neanderthal eyes. But it’s worth it: It’s a greater novel than Lord of the Flies. There are also more than a dozen very good pf works in English, and another dozen very good ones in French, only a few of which have been translated. The French have always been very big on pf: Many of the famous early archaeological discoveries were made in France, so the French considered cavemen to be honorary Frenchmen. MILLER: There’s a French joke in there somewhere. RUDDICK: Yes, it’s a movie called RRRrrrr!!! (I’m not kidding: Google it and see!) MILLER: I agree that The Inheritors is a challenge. I had a heck of a time with it, for precisely the reason you mention — it took reading the first chapter three or four times to get a handle on it. But Golding wasn’t just writing about Neanderthals, was he? He was trying to tell us something about ourselves and modern society. His Neanderthals were sort of like flower people with prominent brow ridges. RUDDICK: Very much so. Golding’s novel, which came out in the aftermath of World War II, suggested that we modern humans have a long history of genocidal violence: Our Cro-Magnon ancestors had wiped out the gentle, loving Neanderthals just for being so irritatingly nice. By the late 1960s, Golding’s allegorical construct had infected mainstream science: The Neanderthals were being described as the first flower people by reputable paleoanthropologists. Of course this was almost certainly a fantasy deriving from the countercultural current of the times. Have you seen how powerfully the Neanderthals were built? One of their women would have been strong enough to rip a Cro-Magnon warrior’s head off with her bare hands. MILLER: Back in the 1980s, The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel, was a big best seller. How has it held up? Is it at least a good page-turning story? RUDDICK: It has held up well, and while it’s a page-turner, it also offers an ingenious speculation about what might have happened to the Neanderthals. Its sequels are increasingly less successful as thrilling narratives, though you can learn a lot about prehistoric life from them. Auel also inspired a large body of romance fiction set in prehistory, only a small proportion of which is interesting in the literary sense. MILLER: How about movies? What’s the best movie set in prehistory? RUDDICK: Quest for Fire, which is based on a pf novel that’s a school classic in France. Most people would find the film more compelling than the novel, even though from a scientific perspective they are equally dubious. This movie gives you a wonderful sense of what it must have been like to find out for the first time that it is possible to make a fire by twirling a stick in a block of wood. MILLER: Do you laugh at those Geico commercials featuring the cavemen? RUDDICK: They’re hilarious. Obviously the extinction of the Neanderthals had something to do with the difficulty of procuring mango salsa in Ice Age Europe.