Lorenzo Mediano

Tras la huella del hombre rojo

   (¬ On the Track of the Red Man)

DeBols!llo, 2007    [tale, Spa, I3]

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It’s 30.000 years in the past. Cro-Magnons have spread all over the known world, and Neandertals only survive in Southern Iberia, covered by a river. And a new Ice Age is hanging.

Ibai, a young Cro-Magnon medicine woman, travels to the spring of the Great River to seek help by the river’s gods and thus defeat the Ice god. And she meets Bid, a Neandertal hunter looking for some big achievement which can gain him respect when he’ll go back to his tribe.

Two different species meet, try getting it over, distrust and appeal each other at the same time. Together, Ibai and Bid are forced to match against a powerful medicine man wishing to rule gods and clans. Ibai is aware that humans can only be saved by Bid, but he doesn’t believe in spirits and deities: he only wants to show his bravery and stay with Ibai, even if she is so much different from his tribe’s women.

Adventure, love and fight between two differing ways of looking at the world, until in the end one prevales. An exciting epic tale about the clash between cultures in prehistoric Iberia. A fascinating recreation of feelings and actions of those old ancestors.

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A funny long tale, recreating an acceptable flavour of prehistoric times. The plot is very thin, but the characters are rendered in a realistic fashion and the reader is presented with a picture where ancient life of both species - Neandertals and Cro-Magnons - is focused to their very present, grasping as much food, sleep and sex as possible whenever these rare godsends are available. Out of an extreme physical typecasting, however - Neandertals are thickset, strong, red-haired with pug noses, and Cro-Magnons are slim, weaker, swarthy with thin nostrils -, a basic difference ...