CONNECTING WITH OUR 40,000-YEAR-OLD ANCESTORS
Author explores lives lived, both then and now
When Toronto author Claire Cameron took a DNA test designed to identify a person’s ancient ancestry, she discovered that she is 2.5 per cent Neanderthal. The Toronto author was a little disappointed, as she had hoped for 4 per cent, the highest average trace of the DNA generally found in humans.
Although the last Neanderthals walked the Earth 40,000 years ago, the common belief for the past 150 years is that Homo sapiens killed off our hunched, hairy cousins — and there was certainly no co-mingling or sex involved. That is, until 2010, when a group of microbiologists led a project to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and discovered that indeed, the two groups had interbred.
Cameron, a subscriber to New Science magazine, was shocked when she read there was proof. Although scientists refused to speculate about how these relationships came to be, it fuelled the writer’s imagination. “It was frustrating because you could see there was this big juicy story there,” she says. “How the two groups could make contact, and under what conditions would they make contact without killing each other on sight?” Cameron realized that answering her question would require study, and so she spent five years scouring research materials.
Her new novel, The Last Neanderthal, follows two narratives, set 40,000 years apart. There’s Girl, the eldest daughter in a small matriarchal group led by Big Mother. A skilled hunter with a nurturing instinct, Girl’s life is focused on survival. Given that Neanderthals left little evidence of their existence, Cameron’s biggest task was getting inside Girl’s head. But the author isn’t one to back away from a challenge: her last novel, The Bear, was told from the perspective of a 5-year-old who must take care of her toddler brother after their parents were mauled to death by a bear.
“I wanted something really invigorating,” Cameron says. “When I start inhabiting the mind of a character with a constraint, it means that I have to be very engaged in solving problems about communication with the reader, and it creates this type of atmosphere where my writing really shines.”
The second narrative follows pregnant archeologist Rosamund Gale, who is leading an excavation in France where she discovered Homo sapiens and Neanderthal bones together within an intimate proximity. Rose, facing her pregnancy and the pressures from her museum employers, becomes obsessed with finishing the dig before giving birth.
“I’m using the modern story to comment on how we have definitely made advances, but we’ve also put women who are trying to survive and feed themselves by making money in a difficult position,” says Cameron, a self-declared feminist. “When you contrast that to ancient times, you can see that this is a choice, rather than something that’s inevitable because of our biology.”
Initially Cameron was reluctant to pursue the contemporary storyline, but as she got deeper into her third draft trying to nail the voice of Girl, Rose’s character kept popping back in. And that’s when Cameron uncovered a personal connection between Girl, Rose and her own life: the birth of her second son, which she recalls as traumatic.
“I experienced something as primal and raw as it was 40,000 years ago,” Cameron says. “We like to tell this story about ourselves that we’ve gone from primitive to perfect, and we’re in this current great state. But there’s no better reminder than childbirth that we have small pelvises and large heads. It is not a great setup.”
Connecting the pregnancies of Girl and Rose gave Cameron empathy for her Neanderthal character, an emotion that has been lacking in pop-culture versions of our early ancestors, from Looney Tunes to the stinker 1990s comedy Encino Man, and the GEICO Cavemen commercials. She has come to believe that the negative portrayal of Neanderthals as non-communicators with low cognitive skills has been miscast and purposely dehumanizing.
“So much of science and pop culture and art is about trying to define human specialness, and why we’re not animals,” Cameron says. “We looked to Neanderthals as the perfect literary foil to see what we’re not. We were looking at them to tell us what is special about ourselves, rather than looking to see that they’re like. And if you see something as the other, you don’t see yourself having sex with it.”