Dance of the Tiger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dance of the Tiger is a short novel published in 1980 written by palaeontologist Björn Kurtén that deals with the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Set 35,000 years ago in Scandinavia, during a thaw in the great Ice Age, the novel follows a Cro-Magnon named Tiger as he tries to defeat Shelk, a tyrant and a hybrid (Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon), the man who killed his father. With his family and much of his tribe dead, Tiger meets, interacts, and allies himself with groups of Neanterthals. He eventually marries Morsinko, a Neanderthal woman. A sequel, Singletusk, published in 1982, continues the story of the family.

Neanderthals are depicted as white-skinned, while Cro-Magnons are dark. Cro-Magnon children and adults have smooth brows and small faces; the characteristic features of childhood act as "innate releasing mechanisms" for feelings of affection.

To the Whites, the Blacks were godlike, tall and eloquent, with a speech as varied and flexible as that of the birds. And there was something else. No White could look at the clear brow of a Black without feeling a mysterious tenderness, such as a child might evoke in the heart of his parents.

Kurtén postulates that this attraction led to intermarriage between the two people, which produced sterile offspring. He emphasizes the possibility of Neanderthal extinction through inter-breeding rather than through violence. He also presents social differences between the two groups, presenting the Cro-Magnon people as more aggressive, practicing slavery and choosing violence to solve social problems. The Neanderthal society, based on matriarchal system, is drawn as peace loving with elaborate social rituals designed to resolve problems.

The novel is known for its plausibility and accuracy. Kurtén's supposition that Neanderthals and ancestors of modern Homo Sapiens occupied same areas in the same time in Europe has been confirmed by fossil evidence.

Kurtén has managed to insinuate into his story - in a way so subtle and natural that we can scarcely recognize he is teaching as well as novelizing - every fact and theory that I know (and several, undoubtedly, that I don't) about Neandertals, Cro-Magnons, human evolution during the Ice Age, glacial geology, and ecology and behavior of the great Ice Age mammals, including mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.

Stephen Jay Gould, introduction to Dance of the Tiger.

Kurtén's racial identification for both Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons is plausible and stands in stark contrast to the corresponding representations in Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series. Author William Golding also examined the issue of Neanderthal extinction in The Inheritors.