Where we come from: The Inheritors (1955) by William Golding

Fateful encounters in the long dawn of early humanity

The British teacher and writer William Golding (1911 - 1993) is seldom closely associated with science fiction, being best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954). A regular fixture of school curricula, his commentary on isolation, power, and civilization had sold over ten million copies by 2015. It was Golding’s second novel, though, which would remain his favourite for the rest of his life. While not marketed as such, The Inheritors (1955) is clearly science fiction - a novel built on paleoanthropology, or the study of the development of early humans.

Begun just weeks after Lord of the Flies was published and written in under a month, The Inheritors focuses on a tight-knit family of Neanderthals in a wooded location which Golding based on Savernake Forest in Wiltshire. The Neanderthals encounter a new presence in their world - strange people with incomprehensible tools and who use hollowed-out logs to navigate the river. As readers, we recognise these strangers as the inheritors of the title: homo sapiens, humans, us. The seeds of Neanderthal extinction have been sown, and the rise of humankind is at hand.

While moving and tragic, The Inheritors is not a simple story of straightforward replacement of Neanderthals by human beings. Instead, it uses the techniques of science fiction not only to help us view the world through the alien eyes of our predecessors, but also to realise that the Neanderthal legacy is a part of us still.

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Hunger and change

The novel is set at an indeterminate time in the deep past, at least several thousand years ago. It focuses on Lok, an adult male at the centre of a Neanderthal family. Besides Lok there is Mal, the aging male leader; his partner “the old woman”; other adults Nil, Ha, and Fa; the child Liku, and the baby known simply as “the new one”. The family is their only unit of organisation; there is no wider community. Under Mal’s faltering leadership, the family are in a constant battle with hunger, seeking to find food wherever they can.

The arrival of “the new people” in the area is a tremendous shock to Lok’s family, what Iain M. Banks might have called an outside context problem for which they have no frame of reference. This sudden intrusion both repels and fascinates the Neanderthal group, even after it contributes to deaths and disappearances within the family. As time goes on, Lok and Fa in particular try to reckon with the situation, but unlike the humans their ability to cope with change is highly limited.

Like us, and unlike us

At the core of The Inheritors is a tension in the way Golding portrays his Neanderthal characters. On the one hand, Lok’s family are presented as an Other, profoundly unlike us in the way that they perceive the world, think, act, and communicate. At the same time, Golding allows us to sympathise with the Neanderthals and their plight, arguably by idealising and humanising them in certain respects.

In a way that is characteristic of accomplished science fiction, Golding achieves a feeling of cognitive estrangement by immersing the reader fully into his imagined Neanderthal perspective. We perceive the forest, the family, and “the new people” as Lok does. For example, at one point a human attempts to kill Lok by using a bow and arrow. This is a technology entirely outside of the Neanderthal experience, so it is perceived by him as a tree he is standing next to suddenly growing a new twig.

Writing to mark the 60th anniversary of the novel, Golding’s daughter Judy commented that her father used “our language to show the lives of people who don’t really have it.” The novel at times has a dreamlike feel, which reflects a writing style designed to capture Golding’s premise that Neanderthal thought was not “sequential or logical.” This is a highly effective display of science fictional alienation, a means of helping us to see the world differently.

Conversely, the novel also portrays Lok and his people as quite similar to us in certain ways. There is a clear love between the family members, and they practice familiar rituals such as the burial of their dead. Judy Golding felt strongly that Lok’s family were based closely on her own relatives, which itself helps to humanise the characters. As David Pringle put it in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, “the Neanderthals are people; we feel for them.”

The Inheritors has been seen as a response to earlier depictions of Neanderthals as brutish cavemen, including H.G. Wells’ story “The Grisly Folk”, published in 1921. Writing in 1999, the archaeologist Clive Gamble stated that for Wells, the Neanderthals “were little more than beasts best exterminated by our ancestors as they arrived in Europe.” For Golding, though, “the loss of the last Neanderthal was a huge blow to our humanity.”

Them and us?

The science of paleoanthropology has continued to advance in the years since The Inheritors was published in 1955. In some ways, these advancements have arguably vindicated some aspects of Golding’s imagined view of Neanderthals. It now seems clear that there was a lengthy period when Neanderthals and early modern humans not only co-existed, but also interbred. For this reason, a small percentage of DNA of Neanderthal origin is still present in the genomes of many contemporary human populations.

The Inheritors, then, is not only about them (Neanderthals) and us (humans). It is not so much about a clean break between these species, but a critical moment of fusion. While Neanderthals and other pre-human hominids became extinct, they left a legacy that remains within us. Reading The Inheritors, we can see ourselves in Lok; but we may also see Lok within ourselves. 

Although Golding was working outside SF as a marketing category, he deployed the techniques of science fiction to powerful effect, challenging us to consider the differences - and similarities - between ourselves and our distant ancestors.

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• Savernake Forest is the site of the famous tree the King of Limbs, which gave its name to an album by Radiohead in 2011.
• Judy Golding’s reflections and background detail on The Inheritors is a very worthwhile resource.
• The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE) has a useful article on prehistoric SF, which describes The Inheritors by saying that "the gulf between old and new cultures is developed with considerable, even hallucinatory, force from the Neanderthal viewpoint."
• Previous novels covered here which also involve Neanderthals include The Shadow Hunter (1982) by Pat Murphy and the Mammoth trilogy (1999 - 2001) by Stephen Baxter.