 Dickinson
(AK, etc.) returns to his native Africa for an imaginative look at humanity's dawn,
postulating a male-dominated tribe of ape-like hominids who depend on the sea for food,
have no tools, and communicate with calls that are not yet language. (In one of several
scrupulous parenthetical explanations, Dickinson apologizes for the names he gives them as
a fictional convenience.) ``Li'' has a genius surpassing Edison's: she not only invents
useful devices (a net to catch minnows, a splint for a broken leg) but is the catalyst for
changing the nature of tribal leadership so that ``it depend[s] less upon dominance and
more upon consent.'' Young and female, Li lacks conventional power; what fascinates her is
solving problems--especially how to get food in the coastal environment so persuasively
described; and she's clever enough not to challenge authority but to bolster it in the
most benign available leader. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, modern anthropologists
investigate the site, their scholarly pursuits and rivalries subtly echoing the earlier
time. Each expertly crafted story builds to a suspenseful climax, but most intriguing is
their eponymous link: a fragment of a dolphin's scapula found on what's now an arid upland
site, with a hole that could only have been drilled by a not-quite-human hand. An
engrossing portrayal of a gifted early hominid, less contrived, more convincing than--and
a fascinating contrast to- -the ape with a transplanted human brain in Dickinson's Eva
(1989). |