Fiction where the Neanthertals weren't extinct?

So I was watching an Eddie Izzard DVD (Unrepeatable or Sexie - one of those) the other night and he was doing a skit about if Neanderthals had survived to this day. It was incredibly funny (if you like Izzard).

Since I’m a sucker for alternative history fiction - especially alternative history science fiction - that made me try to remember novels with the same theme. I know there’s an SF novel or two about this, but I can’t remember any titles. Any ideas?

ETA: I did remember Jeff Long’s The Descent just now, which sort of fits the bill - a separate branch of humanity that adapted to underground life. But there has to be something else!

Michael Crichton’s The Eaters of the Dead. It posits that isolated neandertal communities existed into the early middle ages in Scandinavia, and may have been the source of various folk tales (the book deals with a variation on the Beowulf story). Pretty good book, and I generally hate Crichton.

It also served as the basis for the truly awsome movie The Thirteenth Warrior, starring Antonio Banderas and a bunch of beefy Vikings.

Ben Bova’s *Orion * has a neanderthal survivor element to it.

Sliders on the sci-fi channel had a race of Cro-Magsthat never died out.

Harry Turtledove’s A Different Flesh posits a world in which Neanderthals were present in North America when Columbus and such got here because Cro-Magnons never made it across the Bering Straight (for whatever reason). It’s a series of short stories covering the period from Jamestown to the 1980s.

Neanderthal

I bought it from a bargain bin and it was pretty mediocre.

Both L. Sprague de Cam,p and Poul Anderson wrote stories about Neanderthal individuals in the modern world. de Camp’s is The Gnarly Man (See Aristotle and the Gun and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, or read half of it here: http://baens-universe.com/articles/The_Gnarly_Man ).

Those characters were called “Kromaggs”, if I recall. They were primates who evolved on an alternate version of Earth. In the real world, Cro-magnons were Homo Sapiens, our species, and live on in anybody with European ancestry.

Not Neandertals – Australopithecus.

The famous L. Sprague de Camp story “The Gnarly Man” has a 50,000-year-old immortal Neandertal living in the modern world.

Turtledove’s novella “Dpwn in the Bottomlands” is set in an alternative reality in which the Mediterranean basin never flooded, and what are inferentially very human Neanderthals and modern man living comfortably side by side is a minor plot element.

Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next series has a race of Neanderthals that were cloned from mumble mumble living along with the people of England.

Hominids by Robert Sawyer is the first book of a trilogy in which a portal is opened between our Earth and one from a parallel universe where Neanderthals did not die out (and humans did). It’s a reasonably good book, although I would say the trilogy gets pretty silly by the end.

I loved that book. Cool idea, and I dig Long’s writing style. Then he wrote a sequel, the name of which I struggle not to remember, in which he shits all over all the coolness of the first book.

Waiting by Frank M. Robinson is a sci-fi thriller positing “What if Neanderthals had evolved and were still among us… and simply waiting to make their big move?” A bit iffy in the execution, but a fun read. There’s a review here, which also discusses two other books in a similar vein: The Silk Code, by Paul Levinson, and Darwin’s Radio, by Greg Bear.

I read it and agree with your assessment.

In the spoofy Glory Lane by Alan Dean Foster, the Neanderthals were evacuated from Earth by aliens back in prehistory to protect them from the less intelligent, but more warlike Cro-Magnons. The Neanderthals get really upset when some other aliens bring a few C-Ms out into the universe.

I agree: the first book is good, but it goes rapidly downhill and is borderline unreadable by the end of the series.

Roger Macbride Allen’s Orphan of Creation features the discovery of australopithecine remains in a modern-era (post-Civil-War) cemetery, followed by a global investigation into their origins. A fascinating and little-known SF novel, well worth discovering.

Kage Baker’s excellent Company series (future history Sci Fi) has various assorted Neandertals, Cro-Magnons, etc. as major characters.

In The Garden of Iden
Sky Coyote
Mendoza In Hollywood
The Graveyard Game
The Company Dossiers: Black Projects, White Knights
(story collection)
The Life of the World to Come
The Children of the Company
The Machine’s Child
Gods and Pawns
(story collection)
The Sons of Heaven

And, um, I guess no one’s brought up Jean Auel out of pity?

Do the Geico cavemen (and their short lamented series) count?

Clan of the Cave Bear isn’t THAT bad. The series goes downhill rapidly after it, but that first book is interesting.

Came in here to mention this series. I will, however, say that I think the final book in the series is rubbish. The rest of the series is fantastic, and I loved it, but the end… Ugh.