Nicholas Ruddick - The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel

I originally planned this book to show how the enlarged temporality opened up by the Darwinian revolution acted upon the imagination of the later nineteenth century and in the process brought the genre of science fiction into being. The first half was to have been on the fiction of our prehuman origins, the second on the fiction of our posthuman destiny. Fairly early in my reading, it became to clear to me that the post-Darwinian fiction of human origins deserved a book to itself and that science fiction didnt describe its subject properly.

My first debt is to those bibliographersespecially Marc Angenot, Nadia Khouri, Gordon B. Chamberlain, and Steve Trusselwho have identified the works constituting the neglected genre of prehistoric fiction. Im also deeply grateful to the University of Regina, which has supported my research unwaveringly over the past twenty-five years, and which named me Presidents Scholar for 200204 on the basis of my original research plan.

My Presidents Scholar award enabled me to visit the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, to read hard-to-obtain texts; Andy Sawyer made me warmly welcome there. I also visited Paleolithic sites in the Vzre and Lot valleys, as well as the Muse National de Prhistoire at LesEyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, the Muse de lHomme in Paris, and the Muse des Antiquits Nationales at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Julie and Brian Coote were hospitable and helpful hosts at La Boissire near Mouzens; Britt and I have fond memories of the magnificent view from the terrace of La Boulangerie over the Dordogne valley.

Im indebted to Susan Robertson-Krezel and her staff at Interlibrary Loan at the Dr. John Archer Library, University of Regina, for their ability to track down my abstruse requests. Thanks also to Michelle Windisch for her assistance with micromaterials. Im grateful to my honors and graduate students in my courses Wells, Darwin, and Scientific Romance, Prehistoric Romance: Intersections of Science and Desire, and Science and Sex in Nineteenth-Century Fiction for their enthusiastic response to course material that was sometimes at a primordial stage of formulation when I presented it to them. My colleague Carlos Londono Sulkin of the Department of Anthropology, University of Regina, was kind enough to read parts of the manuscript from an anthropologists perspective and make many useful comments. Thanks to Judy Peace, Printing Services, University of Regina, for her assistance with the illustrations.

Many thanks to Suzanna Tamminen, director of Wesleyan University Press, and Eric J. Levy, former acquisitions editor, for their rapid and enthusiastic response to my proposal for this book. Im very grateful to Gary K. Wolfe for his many useful suggestions in his report on the manuscript. Thanks also to Parker Smathers of Wesleyan University Press for his guidance during the later stages of the project. I owe a special debt to Arthur B. Evans for his unstinting encouragement and assistance.

Finally, Id like to thank my father: my interest in human prehis-tory began in about 1956 when he adorned the playroom in Water-park Road with parietal paintings of hunters and animals in the Spanish Levantine style of Valltorta.

Small parts of this book have appeared, usually in a different form, in the following articles: Sexual Paradise Regained? C. J. Cutcliffe Hynes New Eden Project, in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction; Jules Verne and the Fossil Man Controversy, in Science Fiction Studies; and Courtship with a Club: Wife-Capture in Prehistoric Fiction, 18651914 in the Science Fiction special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies, edited by David Seed. Please see the Works Cited section for full references.

From a status like that of the Crees,
Our societys fabric arose,
Developd, evolved, if you please,
But deluded chronologists chose,
In a fancied accordance with Mos
es, 4000 B.C. for the span
When he rushed on the world and its woes,
Twas the manner of Primitive Man!

Andrew Lang [and E. B. Tylor],
Double Ballade of Primitive Man (1880)

The central issue of the first French pf was the existence of the fossil man so categorically denied by Cuvier.

There the narrator is confronted by a revolting creature resembling an orangutan, in the company of his equally disgusting family, all covered with stinking filth. Boitard then summarizes the material evidence from many French sites to prove that Cuvier was wrong; fossil men (and women) certainly existed. Moreover, our ancestors were not Adam and Eve but demi-apes whose lives were anything but Edenic. Boitards scatological portrait of our foreparents is correctively satirical: it is no accident that his cave dwellers are strongly reminiscent of Swifts Yahoos in part 4 of Gullivers Travels (1726).

Boitards aim is to promote the new scientific account of human origin, one shockingly different from, yet truer than, the biblical and Cuverian accounts. A full decade before Darwins Descent of Man (1871), Boitard was arguing that we do better to celebrate the distance that we have ascended on our own initiative from our lowly origin, than to lament how far we have fallen from the scriptural Eden. The frontispiece of Paris avant les hommes shows fossil man caped in an animal skin brandishing a stone ax as he stands protectively in front of his mate and infant ( may be the earliest incarnation of the popular-culture icon of the caveman.

The next significant work of French pf was published only four years after Boitards, but in the intervening time there had been an explosion of knowledge and speculation about human prehistory. In 1863 alone, Thomas Henry Huxleys Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature had provided a powerful anatomical argument for the close cousinship of humans and apes; Charles Lyells Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man had concluded that there were unshakable geological proofs of humanitys lengthy descent; and Louis Figuier had produced in La Terre avant le Dluge (translated as The World before the Deluge in 1865) the first best-selling chronicle of deep time from the Precambrian to the Quaternary appearance of man, illustrated with striking scenic engravings by Edouard Riou.

Moreover, by 1865 excavations had begun at many subsequently notable and productive archaeological sites including Les Eyzies, La Madeleine, and Laugerie Basse in Prigord; Edouard Lartet and his English collaborator Henry Christy had shown that people of the Reindeer Age (the Upper Paleolithic) had made accomplished mobiliary (portable) artworks;

Figure 1.1 Boitards fossil man protects his family.

LHomme depuis cinq mille ans (Five thousand years of man) (1865) by Samuel-Henry Berthoud (180491) employs a narrative strategy still current in pf that strives, as Stephen Baxter recently put it, to dramatize the grand story of human evolution (567), namely, an episodic rather than a temporally unified narrative. of Berthouds book, is the first pure pf narrative.

A tribe, ruled by an old man, appears on the uninhabited banks of the Seine after having fled north from the Vzre to escape their enemies. They are delighted by the prospect of the easily fortifiable Ile de la Cit and by the butte of Montmartre with its accommodating caves. The men are small and robust with long reddish hair; the women are blonde and wear necklaces of animal teeth. Energetic as a result of their ceaseless war with necessity, they expel the bear ( ) occupying the best cave and make fire to fend off nocturnal carnivores. Then they settle down diligently to their industries: hunting, tool manufacture, and artwork for the men; cooking, tailoring, and jewelry-making for the women. The old chief having invoked the protection of the sun god, social development proceeds apace.