Director Jean-Jacques Annaud is obsessed with historical precision in his films. During the filming of
The Name of the Rose
, the adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel, he had a few days with the main European medievalists, including Jacques le Gof and Michel Pastoureau, investigating whether or not the monks ate with their hoods on. . It was a small detail, but expensive: if they uncovered their heads to eat, the extras had to be tonsured and they would charge much more. He also had the pigs that appear in the background in the abbey courtyard painted black when Pastoureau explained that in the Middle Ages pigs were not pink, but black or spotted.
For the adaptation of
In Search of Fire
,
the great prehistoric novel by the Belgian J.-H. Rosny Aîné, a pseudonym for Joseph Henri Honoré Boex, first published in 1911, spared no expense: he hired the ethologist Desmond Morris, then a world authority as the author of
The Naked Monkey
, to imagine the movements and body language of men. prehistoric and the novelist and scholar Anthony Burgess (the author of
A Clockwork Orange
or
Earthly Powers
) to invent the languages that speak (rather grunt) the different human species that appear in the series. Hollywood legend says that when William Faulkner was commissioned to write the script for
Land of the Pharaohs
The first thing he did was call Howard Hawks to ask "how the hell the pharaohs spoke."
Annaud put Morris and Burgess on the payroll to try to answer that question applied to prehistory.
However, it was not enough.
More information
"The sex of Neanderthals with other species shows that they were much more sociable than us"
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2021-04-07/el-genome-mas-antiguo-de-un-europeo-desvela-sexo-continuo-con-los-neandertales.html
Although they recognized that it recreated prehistory with reliability and credibility (it is impossible to know what it was like, but at least it could have been how Annaud reconstructed it), most specialists criticized the scientific rigor of the film for a crucial detail: two different human species , one more primitive and another more advanced, it is assumed that a Neanderthal and a sapiens, had sexual relations.
When the film was released in 1981, such an encounter seemed impossible.
However, the remote past is constantly changing and with it humanity's perception of itself.
What at the end of the 20th century seemed like nonsense, at the beginning of the 21st century it became a reality.
Still from the film In Search of Fire (1981), which shows a 'sapiens' and a Neanderthal.
A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), led by Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo, succeeded in sequencing Neanderthal DNA in 2011 and offered a discovery that transformed prehistory: hybridizations between Neanderthals and sapiens occurred 70,000 years ago and the result of these sexual encounters is that non-African humans have between 2% and 4%. Since then, things have not stopped getting complicated and the coexistence of different human species that
In Search of Fire described
has been confirmed.
This novel was written when prehistory was an emerging science that provoked a mixture of fascination, rejection and distrust: the idea that white men were descendants of a species born in Africa did not always square with the colonialism and institutional racism that permeated the life of Western societies, which had barely left slavery two generations ago. If there is a science that shows without the slightest doubt - how sad that it is necessary to show it - that all humans are equal, that is without a doubt the study of the remote past. The discovery by Pääbo's team confirmed that all human societies, for thousands of years, had been multicultural, even
multispecies
. Since this same month of July, we know that there was a time when at least eight human species coexisted on earth and that the loneliness of
homo sapiens
, for about 40,000 years, is the exception.
If there has been a topic that has interested prehistoric literature, it is precisely that, the encounter of different species that share the same space, especially between Neanderthals and humans. The British Nobel Prize winner for Literature William Golding, author of
The Lord of the Flies
, published in 1955, during the Cold War, the novel
The Heirs
(Minotaur) in which he recounted how a Neanderthal clan faced the near end of their species. In one of the most moving moments of a strange and evocative book, an elder of the tribe confesses to one of the young men: "There are other people in the world." The Neanderthal tribe realizes that everything has changed when they return in their nomadism to the ancestral pastures of their clan because other people haunt that territory. The
Homo sapiens
are described as cruel beings, who destroy the world in their path, one of the marks of Golding's work.
Panel with cave paintings from the Lasceaux cave, France.Heritage Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
The Tiger Dance
(Plot), by Swedish paleontologist Björn Kurtén, is often cited by prehistoric experts as the best novel about humanity's remote past.
"
The tiger dance
takes place at the time of the disappearance of the Neanderthals", writes Juan Luis Arsuaga in the prologue of the Spanish edition.
“In each and every place where it happened, someone thought, 'I am the last of my kind.
It's time to die ”, adds the co-director of Atapuerca and author together with Juan José Millás of one of the prehistoric successes of the year,
Life told by a sapiens to a Neanderthal
(Alfaguara).
The saga of
The Cave Bear Clan
(Pocket Bag),
by Jean M. Auel, the
best-seller
on prehistory par excellence, begins with the story of a Sapiens girl who is orphaned and adopted by a Neanderthal clan. And
The Last Neanderthal
(Maeva), by Claire Cameron, recounts the connection between a Neanderthal and the scientist who investigates the site where it rests 40,000 years later, as if the relationship between species exceeds time and space.
In almost all of these books, prehistory is used as a framework for classic adventure novels, but also as a reflection on the destructive power of humans throughout time and its implications for the present. But, above all, these books contain many lessons in humility, the most important of which is that being alone is an exception: if the first
homo sapiens
arose about 200,000 years ago (although other scientists speak of 300,000) at least until 40,000 years ago we shared the planet with other human species. Why they disappeared and we are still here remains a mystery that questions us about our fragility much more now that we know that we are the last, that there are no other people in the world.
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