Man Of The Past Today’s Hot Guy Is A Real Neanderthal And Hollywood Is Onto The Trend

Could it be an urge to take stock with the looming approach of the millennium? Perhaps it is the flurry of new discoveries in the field of paleoanthropology? Or maybe something as simple as copycats in Hollywood?

Whatever or perhaps because of the workings of coincidence the past few months have seen the appearance of a half-dozen major books dealing with man’s earliest ancestors, fiction and nonfiction, with two of the caveman novels headed for the screen as a result of million-dollar-plus deals.

“There’s something about the millennium as a landmark event that’s gripping,” said John Darnton, whose “Neanderthal” is one of the novels being eyed by Hollywood.

Darnton recalled four years ago, when he turned 50, “I found my mind reaching back” to his own childhood and to the lives of his parents. “So why not the whole world going on this quest when there’s this magic date coming up?”

“It’s where the action is in paleoanthropology,” said Ian Tattersall, whose “Last of the Neanderthals” is one of the recent nonfiction explorations of the subject.

Tattersall, director of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, explained that the focus has shifted “from the search for our earliest ancestors to a debate over where homo sapiens came from.” And finding out where man’s prehistoric predecessors fit in, he said, “provides the closest mirror to hold up to ourselves and to judge the extent of our own uniqueness.”

“The essence of our fascination,” said science writer James Shreeve, author of “The Neandertal Enigma,” is that there was a period about 30,000 years ago when Neanderthals and the direct ancestors of modern humans roamed Europe together. That period, he said, marked “the last encounter between ourselves and another intelligent, intelligible form of being.”

And the possibility of a future encounter with an intelligent life that exists somewhere out in the farther reaches of space heightens the attraction, said Shreeve.

“It all develops out of a great scientific interest,” said Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard University zoologist and geologist. “It’s fascinating,” he added, “to consider how two separate species - Neanderthals and homo sapiens - “coexisted and related to each other.”

All this suggests that “these are themes that are right at this moment,” said Martin Levy, a marketing executive at Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, which has optioned the Darnton novel.”There’s an atmosphere out there for this.”

Romanian-born filmmaker Petru Popescu, whose “Almost Adam” is already in “pre-production” at 20th Century Fox, recalls the emotional atmosphere one night in Africa a dozen years ago. He was camped out on the savannah, and as he heard the noises of animals in the darkness, “realized how ill-equipped I was to deal with that,” he said. “Then I wondered how did so ill-equipped a species as us survive.”

Darnton’s “Neanderthal” and Popescu’s “Almost Adam” have a similar theme of the survival of prehistoric man into the present day - Darnton’s Neanderthals from 30,000 years ago and Popescu’s australopithecines from 2 million years ago. They hit the bookstores within days of each other last month, and both have been picked up for $1 million-plus by major studios.

Ultimate ancestor books and films are nothing new - from novels like Bjorn Kurten’s “Dance of the Tiger” to films like “Clan of the Cave Bear” and cartoon characters like “B.C.” and “The Flintstones.” But the new books - and hopefully, their film versions - are buttressed by recent archaeological and anthropological discoveries that suggest that the survival of prehistoric man is a scientific possibility, not a fantasy.

Shreeve notes that the recent redating of a Neanderthal jawbone from Spain to 28,000 years ago means that “their moment of extinction creeps ever closer to the present.”

But, he wonders, if they lingered on in out-of-the-way corners of Europe until 28,000 years ago, “why not 20,000, or 15?” Then, “take this one step further,” he said, “and picture one last enclave somewhere, left alive today.”

And that is precisely the scenario that Darnton - who actually has one of his characters refer to Shreeve - and Popescu detail.

Darnton, 54, is the New York Times’ London bureau chief and 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the Solidarity movement in Poland. He sends two American paleontologists, once-and-future lovers, deep into the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan in search of their academic mentor, who has vanished there after discovering a surviving band of Neanderthals.

Darnton says he was “bitten by the Neanderthal bug” after seeing the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira in northern Spain a dozen years ago. But that passion only began to take shape as a book after he read that a team of French scientists had concluded from new data that Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for several thousand years with modern humans. “I began to wonder,” he questioned, “why did we survive and they didn’t?” “Neanderthal” attempts to answer that question - with the twist that some did survive.

Popescu, 47, is a Romanian-born novelist and screenwriter whose literary hero is the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, who also learned English in order to write. Popescu defected in 1977 with the help of novelist John Cheever. He strands his paleontologist in an isolated part of Kenya, where he encounters an 8-year-old boy, one of a band of ape-human australopithecines thought to have been extinct for 2 million years.

The surfacing of two books with similar themes touched off a highstakes marketing campaign fueled by buzz over the million-dollar Hollywood bidding war.

Two years ago, Random House paid $25,000 for “Neanderthal,” almost as a favor to the late senior editor Joseph Fox. Then last fall Darnton’s agent shopped it around Hollywood, where three studios ended up bidding for it. Spielberg’s DreamWorks acquired the rights for more than $1 million.

About the same time, Popescu’s agent sold “Almost Adam” to 20th Century Fox for $1.5 million, and William Morrow bought the book a few days later for $1.75 million.

Random House’s realization that it had a potential best-seller in a book it had grudgingly acquired triggered a race to the bookstores. “Almost Adam,” with a first printing of 240,000, hit the stores March 27; and “Neanderthal,” with a first printing of 100,000 (and two quick reprints for another 30,000), three days later.

But one month out, “Neanderthal” is well ahead in sales, No. 7 on the New York Times best-seller list and in a similar place on the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists - perhaps aided by a more arresting cover.

“Almost Adam” may also win the race to the movie houses with a first draft of the screenplay already completed. Popescu, an experienced Hollywood hand - he wrote the screenplay for Peter Weir’s “The Last Wave” - thinks his book, in which contemporary humans play larger roles than they do in “Neanderthal,” will be the better film.

But Levy, the DreamWorks executive, says new film techniques like computer imaging could free “Neanderthal” from the limitations that made caveman films like “Quest for Fire” and “Clan of the Cave Bear” artistic and box-office failures.

“Think of all the old dinosaur movies,” said Levy. “Then someone comes along with some new ideas and new techniques and you’ve got ‘Jurassic Park.”’ “With the things you can do now,” he said, “you can really stretch the imagination and take it further than ever before.” Which, after all, is what “Neanderthal” and “Almost Adam” are attempting to do.