PREHISTORIC POTBOILERS

By IAN TATTERSALL

Twist any paleontologist's arm and you'll eventually elicit a fantasy about meeting long-extinct animals in the flesh. That's understandable enough, for fossil bones and teeth are frustratingly mute about so many of the things that made them the living organisms they once were. This is never more true than with the fossils of early hominids. But few paleoanthropologists have actually had the nerve to go public with their most imaginative musings, at least partly because they are so conscious of the gulf between what can and cannot reliably be said.

Novelists, on the other hand, need have no such scruples, and here are two who certainly don't. John Darnton, chief London correspondent for the New York Times, has entered the arena with a book called Neanderthal (Random House; 368 pages; $24), centered on the large-brained human species that, as far as paleontologists are concerned, became extinct about 27,000 years ago. Simultaneously, screenwriter Petru Popescu has weighed in with Almost Adam (William Morrow; 544 pages; $24), about australopiths, a group of small-brained but upright-walking human precursors whose most recent fossils are more than a million years old. Eschewing time machines and historical settings, both authors have opted to have modern paleoanthropologists come face to face with relict populations of early hominids in remote and unexplored corners of the world: the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan in Darnton's case, southern Kenya in Popescu's.

The similarities don't stop there. In many ways both writers' books have more in common with a science-fiction view of the human future than with any rational interpretation of our species' past. Mad scientists were perhaps obligatory, but who would have thought that both Neanderthals and australopiths communicated using not language (fair enough) but esp? And in both novels, two sets of primitives, good and bad, battle it out; younger researchers meet their former professors under bizarre circumstances; sexual tension breaks out between scientists and primitive hominids; and fieldworkers become the innocent pawns of dark political and military maneuverings.

Regrettably, both novelists use these intrigues and their violent consequences to avoid the larger and much more interesting issues implicit in the confrontation of ancient and modern hominids. The heroes of both books eventually decide to keep their extraordinary discoveries secret. Most remarkable of all, distinguished scientists in both books spend an inordinate amount of time laboriously explaining to one another stuff they had to have learned as undergraduates. Couldn't more convincing stooges have been found?

The authors have, of course, done their homework, but neither anywhere near as diligently as, say, Jean Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear); they get C's at best. Despite their authoritative tone, these books are mines of misinformation--and not just in detail. They are to paleoanthropology what Indiana Jones is to archaeology--pure fantasy constructs. And while this may sound like carping on my part, given that these are, after all, works of fiction, it's fair to point out that no scientist likes to see his field of study caricatured--all the more so when the caricaturists have taken Hollywood for millions of dollars in movie rights for what are pretty run-of-the-mill potboilers.

But the matter cuts deeper than envy or hurt feelings. For it does nobody any favors when the nature of science is distorted in the public mind. Paleoanthropology is most emphatically not a business in which a single discovery in some exotic locale will magically answer all our questions--or even any of them. Indeed, the fun really begins only after discoveries have accumulated and we can begin to discern patterns among them.

The major disappointment, then, is that although these books will expose millions of people to some of paleoanthropology's most powerful ideas--albeit in an unreliable way--neither evokes in the slightest the intellectual challenge of a science that is central to the understanding of where we humans fit into nature. And neither even attempts to exploit the promising device of confronting human with almost human to explore the essence of our uniqueness as a species.

So what's the verdict? If you want reliable information about where our species came from, steer clear of these two books and consult any of the several very readable nonfiction works recently published on the subject. If you want to read a novel that uses a contemporary paleoanthropologist's discovery of thought-to-be-extinct-but-alive-after-all hominids to launch an ingenious and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human, see if your local library or used-book store still has a copy of Vercors' You Shall Know Them, which was published back in the 1950s. If your tastes run to pulp fiction instead, either of these novels might make an adequate companion on a plane ride. If you choose Popescu, better make sure it's a long trip.

Ian Tattersall is chairman of the American Museum of Natural History's anthropology department. His most recent book is The Last Neanderthal (Macmillan; 1995).