synopsis:

'The Inheritors' is at first glance a mere primitive tale, though clearly based on serious linguistic, psychological, and anthropological research. But it gradually becomes apparent that the primitive story is a mirror for the contemporary age. The problems of the primitive society are contemporary. The struggle for survival by the last of the Neanderthals, as they encounter the more sophisticated tribe with their canoes and sharper weapons, is the situation of modern man confronted by technological advances in weapons and destructive chemicals. Just as Homo sapiens treated the Neanderthal with cruelty, so technology, according to Golding, produces a new potentiality for human cruelty in the modern world.

His examination of the roots of personal and racial hatred leads him to suggest that the problem of man's inhumanity to man is not a new one, and that the need for reform is more than governmental; it must take into account the individual's natural proneness to evil.

on this book:

Golding favoured this work above all his others. Many have agreed that his account of the final defeat of the last Neanderthal individuals at the hands of the emergent human race is powerfully and above all consistently imagined. The triumphs and disasters of the future are tragically implicit in this evocation of the conquest of an earlier, gentler group by those who are - for good and ill - our ancestors.