{"id":18140,"date":"2010-07-14T00:43:02","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T08:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=4906"},"modified":"2010-07-14T00:43:02","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T08:43:02","slug":"%e2%80%9cthe-inheritors%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/14\/%e2%80%9cthe-inheritors%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Inheritors\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8853_jpg_280x450_q85\"<\/a>I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors<\/a>. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies<\/a>, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast<\/a> of an interview with a biographer<\/a> of the great author, and it seems that Golding and many of his admirers who are “close readers” judge The Inheritors<\/a> as his finest novel.<\/p>\n

The general outline of the plot is easy enough to find on Wikipedia, it is one of those stories about the transition from a “bushy” hominin tree of life to the dominance of H. sapiens sapiens<\/em>. Neandertals are finally expiring as a species in the face of the advance of modern humans, who marginalize and extirpate all those who came before. But I get the impression that the execution of Golding’s attempt is very different from Clan of the Cave Bear<\/a>. Not having read the book yet I do not know if William Golding’s depiction is up to snuff with the latest scholarship on the Neandertals (granted, I am not up to date on the latest scholarship on Neandertals!), though he did guess correctly<\/a> in all likelihood as to their pigmentation. But, in light of the highly probable non-trivial Neandertal ancestry in over 80% of humans, I feel like revisiting Golding’s vision in the near future, as we carry within our genomes the shadows of both<\/em> the inheritors and the dispossessed. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,30,291,461,462],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-human-evolution","category-neandertals","category-the-inheritors","category-william-golding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18284,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18140\/revisions\/18284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}