Interesting as a thought experiment, about how a female neanderthal would live in the years of the species' decline just before extinction. Neanderthals are a thing, scientifically speaking. Not made up. Human DNA has a large chunk of chromosomes that are the same as neanderthal DNA. Which indicates that humans and neanderthals are two separate species originating from a common ancestor, but that they also co-existed on earth and that they inter-bred.
The book illustrates the idea of how a human child could be found, adopted, and raised by a neanderthal family, and tries to explore how the neanderthals were different. Their bodies were more in-tune with the environment in terms of smell and sensing what was going on in the air. The author creates a theory that the family unit sleeps and dreams together and exchanges information from their ancestors through dreams. The body of knowledge of the family unit is the life force that keeps them going.
The young human who has been adopted by the family ends up running away when he sees the landscape pointing to his homeland. It is across the prairie where the neanderthals would never go. The boy tries to explain to the woman that she needs to follow him to survive and give birth to her baby, but she can't make herself go.
The buries herself in an underground den to survive the winter. She gives birth to a baby which doesn't survive. She keeps a bone from the baby's fore-arm and wears it around her waist.
The modern connection is the woman archeologist who has discovered two skeletons in a cave in France. They are a neanderthal and a human, obviously buried facing each other, or perhaps they died in that position of looking into each other's eyes. A small human arm bone is found beside the skeleton of the neanderthal woman.
We are left to image how this might have come to be, and the book tells an interesting and informative story to help us along the way. It also helps illuminate and describe the feelings and physical forces that take over when a woman is pregnant, and how the demands of being pregnant and producing a baby, giving birth, caring for it, all fall on the woman no matter what walk of life she is from. There is that place of commonality for every woman, even across the line separating neanderthal females and human females.
Interesting. I would recommend it.
