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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

processes lies not in its scientific plausibility, but in how effectively he
conveys a sense of profound difference between modern humans and
their Neanderthal cousins. Golding’s Neanderthals think in pictures,
which they can share with their group members wordlessly, almost
telepathically. By endowing his Neanderthals with this more-than-
human cognitive ability, Golding pushes back against previous cultural
representations of Neanderthals as bloodthirsty, brutish creatures. 21
Even more strikingly, Golding’s Neanderthals appear incapable of in-
tentional violence. Yet they are also severely limited in their abstract
reasoning: their minds are drawn to sensory details in a way that slows
down—and in some cases seems to inhibit—inference and generaliza-
tion. Golding’s Neanderthals thus oscillate between human, more-
than-human, and animal features in a way that foregrounds the ideo-
logically loaded question of their cognitive difference. The novel thus
speaks to contemporary discussions on Homo sapiens exceptionalism,
22
and by extension to fields such as disability and autism studies. The
challenge for the reader of The Inheritors is learning to appreciate Lok’s
cognitive difference without establishing a hierarchical power relation
with him, which adds to the difficulty of Golding’s prose.
Indeed, as readers engage with the Neanderthal-focalized chap-
ters they are asked to infer what is going on in the storyworld by ex-
trapolating from the rich sensory texture of Lok’s consciousness. In
Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes’s words, we “share [Lok’s] lim-
itations as we use his eyes. It is of course open to us to use our own

21 Cf. the novel’s epigraph, drawn from H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, which
ascribes to the Neanderthals “an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive
strangeness.” For a comparative approach to Golding’s depiction of the Ne-
anderthals, see Charles DePaolo, “Wells, Golding, and Auel: Representing
the Neanderthal,” Science Fiction Studies 27, no. 3 (2000): 418-38.
22 On Homo sapiens exceptionalism, see Jon Mooallem, “Neanderthals Were
People, Too,” The New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2017, h ps://www.ny-
times.com/2017/01/11/magazine/neanderthals-were-people-too.html. Cf. also
Emily Thornton Savarese and Ralph James Savarese, eds., “Autism and the
Concept of Neurodiversity: Special Issue,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no.
1 (2010).

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