Neanderthal by John Darnton. Just in case someone here has the odd desire to read it, I’m going to put my synopsis in spoilers, because you just don’t get the full ass-tastic scope of it otherwise.
[spoiler]Susan Arnot and (the improbably named) Matt Mattison are paleoanthropologists who have spent their lives studying Neanderthals. They were lovers in grad school, broke up, and are now hateful academic rivals. So, of COURSE they are both picked for a top-secret assignment to try to find the last living Neanderthals on the planet. Their old mentor has gone missing in search of these living relics, see, and for some bizarre reason the only people on the planet that could possibly know him well enough to track him in some remote mountains in Asia are two people who haven’t spoken to him or each other in years.
Along the way, Susan and Matt bicker and flirt and lust for one another. Matt also, helpfully, lectures a linguist on language. Because, surely, a paleoanthropologist would know more about language than someone who actually works in that field.
So, they make it up these remote mountains. They find the Neanderthals. Promptly, the least important member of their party (and the only non-American) is killed by the Neanderthals so they can eat his brain. Susan and Matt manage to escape, leaving the linguist to the tender mercies of the Neanderthals.
During their struggle to escape, they learn a few things about their attackers. Apparently, Neanderthals did not have language. Instead, they used their psychic powers to communicate with one another. It’s some sort of interactive remote viewing type of thing, so that they can show each other what they’re looking at.
So, they escape, and end up in a beautiful, sunny Garden of Eden style paradise, just a little ways away from the cold, snowy, evil cave of the bad Neanderthals. In the garden-like spot in the mountains, there are happy, friendly Neanderthals, who are naked and have sex all over the place. So Susan and Matt have a bunch of sex and are naked and happy, too. But their mentor is there, and he’s mad that they found him.
See, their mentor had the brilliant idea of trying to hide the Neanderthals from the outside world, because anthropologists are often able to keep entire civilizations completely unspoiled by outside contact. He was going to hide them by sending a fresh Neanderthal skull back, claiming that this was all he found, and then hide out in the mountains and continue to study them. Because, of course, no one would find this to be suspicious at all or go after him. We can see why this man is considered such a genius in his field.
Well, eventually Matt and Susan decide to go help the linguist. They sneak back over to the caves and look at a cave painting, which they’re able to decipher. See, there’d been this big war between our ancestors and the Neanderthals. Our ancestors won not because we’re able to communicate fully and Neanderthals can only show each other mental slideshows, but because we’re good at lying. The Neanderthal survivors of this great war fled to this particular mountain range, never developed any further technology or tried leaving the mountains, and yet they have faithfully recorded and remembered the lesson of this 40,000 year old event.
While reading this cave painting that is so incredibly easy to understand, Matt and Susan are attacked. Susan gets kept captive, Matt manages to escape back to the Garden of Eden. The linguist has his brain eaten.
Matt somehow manages to meet up with a Marine or something. I don’t know. They build a big Trojan Bear and send it to the bad Neanderthals, and since the bad guys have learned their lesson of the lies of homo sapiens, they decide to burn the Trojan Bear. Of course, Matt knew that they would burn the Trojan Bear, and so he had hid explosives inside of the Trojan Bear. I guess the Marine had them? I don’t know.
Oh, yeah, and the mentor got it into his head that the bad Neanderthals were the favored children of evolution and Must. Not. Be. Tampered. With. So he goes to warn them of this trick, and instead gets his brain eaten.
Anyway, bad Neanderthals are killed, Susan is rescued, hurray.
In the end, the garden Neanderthals decide for some unfathomable reason to move from their wonderful, warm pretty garden into the freezing cold, dark cave. Matt, Susan, and the Random Marine head down the mountains. When they’re found, they make the same claim that the mentor did–there are no Neanderthals here! Because, of course, nobody will ever, ever go up into those mountains, ever again.[/spoiler]
It was really, really bad. It was like if Michael Crichton wanted to write a book about anthropology and he went on a porn binge while writing it.
