any good prehistoric man books?

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rai

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I don't know if this has been covered before, not sure it's in the SFF realm or not, but at least you guys can say if it is.

I am reading a book by William Golding called "The Inheritors" about a clan of Neanderthals who meet modern man.

So far, I am not getting into the story, not sure if I want to continue or pack it in before I get too far to quit. This book tries to be very literature, and I'm not feeling it. There is a passage where one Neanderthal says to his mate: "We shall find food and we shall make love" (I know it's translated from Neanderthal to English, but somehow I am not sure about this).

Any good books on the subject?
 
I'm not keen on them, but a lot of people like Jean M Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and the series that followed it. She likes her interludes of sex, though, in case you're not keen on that in books.
 
Jean M Auel's series is pretty decent up until the 5th book. If you read the first 4 and then stop its a good series. The 5 book was pretty horrible and I haven't been able to bring myself to read the last one.
 
West of Eden by Harry Harrison is an interesting one. The book takes as its premise that the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs was much smaller, and only wiped out half of them. What results is a power struggle between cave people and something very much like intelligent dinosaurs. It's an interesting read.
 
Stephen Baxter's Origin has various stages of humanoid development in it. I hated it, but it got mixed reviews on Amazon; some even gave it 5/5. It certainly didn't the type of issue you mentioned above.
 
My thoughts on the Jean Auel books - unreadable. Basic writer mistakes committed in the first few chapters of the first book.

There's always Julian May's 'Many Coloured Land' books, though perhaps they haven't stood the test of time quite as you'd hope, and also Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time, which is very well thought of.
 
One of the best pieces of writing I've ever come across is the first story in Alan Moore's The Voice of the Fire, which not only (as far as I can tell) brilliantly captures neolithic life, it does it in a way of speaking (and, more importantly, thinking) very different from ours. Hugely inventive, and massively repays the effort needed to get into it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The rest of the book is good too, but goes through later periods.

I'll also add a recommendation for the beautiful graphic novel Mezolith.
 
There's the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy by Robert Sawyer, also about prehistoric visitors to the future.
 
The Jean M Auel books have some enthusiastic fans. Personally I found Clan of the Cave Bear to be almost offensively bad. Really horrible. Cannot rmember having had such a bad reaction to a book until the first of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.

For some low-grade prehistoric fun try ER Burroughs Pellucidar stories, which are probably available on Project Gutenburg, or the Littlenose stories by John Grant.
 
I'm with Wynbren on Jean Auel's books. I thought "Clan of the Cave Bear" was nothing short of brilliant. It was a book I could not put down, but each successive book was less brilliant. I own the first four, and yesterday thought about reading the fifth massive tome because I ran across in a local library, didn't but likely will eventually. I can't bring myself to buy what I suspect will be a dull read.
 
Philip Boast's Era and Sion both start back in, I think, the Stone Age. And there's Ember from the Sun by Mark Canter, about a prehistoric woman whose found frozen and brought back to life in the present day.
 
I was nagged for about 10 years to read the Jean Auel books - actually enjoyed them far more than I expected, but then I had low expectations. :)

It's nicely researched and the neolithic landscape is fairly authentic, excepting for the fact that Ayla and Jondalar personally discover a few thousand years worth of innovations, but heigh ho.

Agree it's a series that weakens, though especially like the characters in The Mammoth Hunters (the third book). Book five was poor, and I refuse to read book 6. First four worth considering for a read, though - very well researched - problems with books 5-6 is that they to forget they are telling a continuous story.
 
As with so many things, it depends on what you're looking for.

For example, Jack London's Before Adam is certainly about prehistoric man... in fact, it is about our pre-human ancestors, as told by a modern descendant experiencing inherited memories. (It also influenced Robert E. Howard's James Allison stories.)

If you're looking for something not necessarily set in that period, but dealing with a prehistoric character, you might try Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy", whether in its original short story form, or the expanded novel form (with/by Robert Silverberg). L. Sprague de Camp also wrote a story on the theme, though the title escapes me at the moment.

Set in that period is also Lester del Rey's "Day is Done", about the last Neanderthal and his relationship to the burgeoning Cro-Magnon tribes.

And then there's this:

http://www.trussel.com/f_prehis.htm

as well as this:

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/prehist1.htm
 
Thanks for those links, have a lot of good info. I have most of those ERB books, not read yet but I might want to dig them out.
 
You are more than welcome. Here's hoping some of what you see there fits what you're looking for....
 
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