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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Apr 2017, 288 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2018, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Chris Fredrick
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From the author of The Bear, the enthralling story of two women separated by millennia, but linked by an epic journey that will transform them both.
40,000 years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate.
But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself.
In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women's lives.
Haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving, The Last Neanderthal asks us to reconsider all we think we know about what it means to be human.
Prologue
They didn't think as much about what was different. There was good reason for this, as they lived in small family groups. Every day was spent among people who were similar to them. The bodies that sat around the fire shared the same kind of cowlick at the backs of their heads, or the same laugh, or teeth that were equally crooked. Every time a head turned to look, a body could find one part of itself in another. It's because of their similarities to us that I can speak for them when I say that much of what you've heard isn't true. They were kind and clever. They had hands with opposable thumbs and a light dusting of hair on the backs. They had hearts that throbbed in their chests when they saw certain people, and this happened more than you might expect. Their brains were larger than ours by about 10 percent. Many of us have inherited up to 4 percent of their DNA, and now that both genomes have been sequenced, we know that theirs differed from ours by only...
Both protagonists struggle under different circumstances, but it is the similarities of these challenges that Cameron reinforces. Some of these parallels feel too heavily drawn. Cameron offers readers a possible storyline that doesn't differentiate our earliest ancestors from Neanderthals so much as welcome Neanderthals into the human tribe. Rose's narrative demonstrates the academic tension and the cultural resistance to new knowledge when it counters long-held cultural beliefs...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Chris Fredrick).
Herman Koch, bestselling author of The Dinner
The Last Neanderthal is one of those novels that opens the world to you in a different way. And after you finish reading, this world will never look the same to you again. Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter
Claire Cameron's newest novel, The Last Neanderthal, is fascinating, insightful and poignant; a moving narrative of the last survivors of a harsh and unforgiving environment that is both exotic and achingly familiar. It is a story of our profound connectedness to our ancestors, exploring the ultimate question of what it means to be truly 'human.' Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours
The Last Neanderthal is astonishing ... I'm thrilled by Cameron's adventurous and deeply empathic tale, an example of what fiction at its best can do. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
A powerful, warm and thought-provoking book that artfully blends facts with fiction to put flesh on many abstract scientific debates.Claire Cameron's The Last Neanderthal stirs interest in our closest evolutionary relative, Homo neanderthalensis.
Evidence from both fossil and genetic research suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans evolved from a common ancestor between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals lived in Europe and southwestern and central Asia. The regions inhabited by Neanderthals overlapped with early Homo sapiens for some period of time, and interbreeding is confirmed: most modern humans have between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA.
The Neanderthals were not much different from us. National Geographic's GENOgraphic project's web page on Neanderthals states that a "growing number of scientists have argued that the Neanderthals' similarities ...
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