Primitive humanoid tribes battle for prehistoric earth.
(from H.G. Wells Selected Short Stories)
But first a history lesson. Actually most of this story is really just a museum tour-style pre-history lesson on what we know and what we don’t know about early man and his world. After a lengthy refresher course in antediluvian anthropology, we take a brief and theoretical sojourn into the old old world to walk with a small migrating band of men as they head north into the territory already claimed by Neandertals who, we already know, do not inherit the earth. Poor bastards. But they do get a few good hits in, and eat some human children before they fall to our ancestors with the spears and the necks that turn so much better and sneakier brains.
I like the way Wells was obviously fascinated and dumbstruck by the notion of getting into the heads of those “grisly folk.” Check out this passage:
in their lusts and desires; but to the best of their poor ability
they obeyed laws and customs already immemorably ancient,
and they feared the penalties of wrong-doing.
We can understand something of what was going on in their minds,
those of us who can remember the fears, desires, fancies
and superstitions of our childhood.
Their moral struggles were ours — in cruder forms.
They were our kind.
But the grisly folk we cannot begin to understand.
We cannot conceive in our different minds the strange ideas that
chased one another through those queerly shaped brains.
As well might we try to dream and feel as a gorilla dreams and feels.
Read the whole story here.
The narrative elements are presented like suppositions: They probably thought this. They probably ate this. Mostly, this reads like an article in a science journal. Wells, who published this in 1921 in something called Storyteller Magazine, has an obvious affinity for the winning team — “true men” he calls them — but I was hopelessly rooting for the dimwitted, grey-haired, apey underdogs.
Go Eagles.