The narrative of the transition from Ape to Man is contained within one astonishing cut in the film 2001…
…but 4 Million years of history contains a lot of potential stories. I am thinking about setting my next novel (after the Singularity’s Children series) back at the Dawn of Man.
It looks like we coexisted and even bred with many other species of Hominid and some of those seem to have been pretty smart. Recent discoveries show that Neanderthals were making cave art hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Neanderthal cave art, spain.
‘Haplo Groups‘ markers allow us to trace humanities deep ancestry. We (Homo Sapiens) left Africa 70K years ago to spread our seed across the world, mingling and mating with the local—as we tend to do.
We eventually replaced the ‘other‘ and history started…
But I love the gaps—into which stories can be inserted!
Maybe I will set it 12,800 Years Ago at the onset of the Younger Dryas, the fall of Eden and the interment of Goebekli Tepe.
Anyway, I think there is plenty of material for a book set at the Dawn of Man…
…what do you think? Would you read it? Or shall I go 12,000 years the other way?
(image: Neanderthal with face paint – Viktor Deak)
A good question! For someone else. It’s well outside my areas of expertise, at least at the moment. As for the passage of time, I’m still marveling at the fifty years that have passed since ‘2001’ was released, leaving behind both its time setting and that of its sequel ‘2010’.
Yes, I watched it with my kids the other day. That the special effects have aged so well is what astounds me most!
Indeed! Everything happens so slowly and majestically that we’d have plenty of time to see the slightest flaw. And they built most things physically, with huge models and a full-scale revolving spaceship interior that the astronaut could jog around for real like a hamster in a big treadmill!
Models and sets do seem to age better than digital bits, Luckily Kubrick was never tempted to CGI remaster anything!