I often think about orangutans when I’m driving to work. Although I’m sure I first saw this anecdote on Twitter, I’ll give you a real citation: Jacobus Bontius, a physician with the Dutch East India Company, wrote in 1658 that the Malays believed the apes had the ability to speak but chose not to, “lest they be compelled to labor.” [1] Bontius was incredulous, but the orangutans are onto something given the resonance of that quote centuries later amongst doomscrollers. For his part, José Maria de Eça de Queirós muses at the end of his Adam and Eve in Paradise—when Adam and Eve become “irremediably human” and “will progress with such speed and impetus towards the perfection of the Body and the glory of the Mind”—on whether the orangutan, who “lingers idly on the soft moss, listening to the limpid songs of the birds, savoring the rays of sunlight,” is worthier of admiration than humans, when one considers all the pitfalls of God’s gifts granted the latter through evolution (pp. 57-59).
Originally published in Portuguese in 1897, Adam and Eve in Paradise has now been reissued by New Directions Publishing, translated for the first time into English by the award-winning and prolific Margaret Jull Costa. Eça de Queirós is less well-known in the anglophone world but is in his native language considered among the greatest novelists of his era for such works as The Crime of Father Amaro (1875) and The Maias (1888). In this slim novella, Eça de Queirós presents an Eden more red in tooth and claw than is traditional, an origin story told in conversational, deadpan style. It traces man’s evolution from tree dweller on October 28, 4004 BC (the date of his creation according to seventeenth-century cleric James Ussher) to the unnumbered long mornings later when Adam and Eve adopt a puppy and commence the work of civilization.
This book is, admittedly, an odd choice for review at Strange Horizons. To be honest, I was a bit bamboozled by the marketing copy. New Directions described this Adam as “a slope-browed Neanderthal” matched with a more human Eve, pursued by ichthyosauruses. [2] I’m in the very early stages of working on my own prehistoric novella, so I was intrigued by the prospect of early speculative fiction on the subject, particularly from a writer more known for realist social commentary. Yet Adam, in the novel itself, is never referred to as a Neanderthal at all. He has an odd amalgamation of traits like a Piltdown Man’s, and begins somewhat orangutan-ish himself: a body covered with curly reddish hair, pointed ears, sharp fangs, deep-set and bushy brows with yellow eyes, clumsy on bowed legs (p. 6). Once he climbs down from the trees, his evolution to something more manlike is presented as a series of tumbles as he moves anxiously through an alternately chaotic and bucolic Eden:
From each of those falls, our Father emerged more human and more our Father. There was a consciousness now, a fast-growing rationality, in the ponderous steps with which he uprooted himself from his arboreal limbo, tearing his way through the tangle of creepers … waking up tapirs asleep beneath monstrous mushrooms or startling a stray young bear who, feet propped against an elm tree, was devouring, half-drunk, the grapes of this abundant autumn. (pp. 9-10)
Adam has his first taste of raw flesh, scavenged from an ichthyosaurus killed by a plesiosaurus, and passes out with the meat sweats. An angel with a flaming sword protects him from animals seeking to destroy “the Intelligent Energy that was destined to subdue Brute Force” and he wakes to find our “Venerable Mother” offering herself up to him for the taking (p. 30-31).
Eve is presented as somewhat more akin to a modern human on her first appearance, much less hairy and oafish. The pair spend their days fleeing a capricious God who is sculpting volcanoes and floods and all manner of other terrors, scraping out an existence “simultaneously sublime and absurd” (p. 14).
The New Directions marketing copy though is worthy of note beyond my bamboozlement: it points to what I found most worthwhile in reflecting on this book. Our modern conception of ourselves as human, and our conception of what is pre-human or less-than-human, is still shaped by the confluence of scientific discoveries and social theories that informed this work. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was clear that human history was much longer and more complicated than previously thought. The first Neanderthal specimen was discovered in 1856, not long before Charles Darwin would publish his theories of evolution. Depictions of Neanderthals became bound up with views around extinction and race. The notion of survival of the fittest meant that extinction was viewed as natural, that the Earth’s inhabitants were part of a meritocracy: If Neanderthals had died out, it meant they were the inferior species. Hermann Schaaffhausen, in his first published analyses of the specimen in 1858, compared it to “‘savage living races,’ which he identified as ‘Negros’ and ‘Malays.’” [3] Phrenology, which had been somewhat in decline, came surging back, and this comparison of living peoples to extinct hominins that were considered more ape-like than human served as further justification for white supremacist thought. Although we now know Neanderthals to have been capable of speech and art and complex toolmaking—all skills that might previously have been considered uniquely human—the popular view of them is still shaped by misconceptions from this earlier era.
As delightful as I find Bontius’s anecdote about the orangutan who does not dream of labor, Eça de Queirós’s positioning of the orangutan as something akin to a “noble savage” is, in light of this history, an enduring reminder that science is often an arm of the capitalist colonial project and its attendant horrors, and our scientific knowledge is shaped in turn by our prejudices.
In marking Adam’s evolution towards “full” humanity, however, Eça de Queirós does not linger too long on the science of it all. His book is poking at our notions about what separates us from the rest of God’s creation, and it takes a dim view of what it has taken to reach the pinnacle of human progress. When Adam is seized by a divine spark of intelligence to hurl a sharpened stick at the Father of All Bears, Eça de Queirós writes that this is the point from which “Man has truly existed on the Earth” (p. 43). Much like Mark Twain’s Adam and Eve (stories also published in this era), Eve’s discoveries of fire and dogs and other essential knowledge are mostly afterthoughts for Adam. It is the hunt that makes the man. When he realizes he no longer has to cower in fear from larger beasts, that he has the tools to become more than a scavenger, it is at that point that he can turn his attention to the work of dominion over the Earth. If it is violence, then, that ultimately makes us human, reading Adam and Eve in Paradise leaves me weighing where we are at present: We have not become gentler creatures, so are we more human now?
If our species doesn’t have sole proprietorship over art or toolmaking or culture or even language, one thing we can likely claim for Homo sapiens sapiens is this desire to be able to point to one particular moment, one defining quality and say: there. That’s where it started. That’s how we got into this whole mess. X has happened because it was preceded by V and U and we could see it presaged in the lines of the crossed T but really we could sing all the way back to A to get to the root of the matter. We want stories that we can tell ourselves, whether it’s to reassure us that we have some semblance of control or that the matter is out of our hands entirely. Origin stories, much like constitutional law and social norms, are only useful so far as we don’t expect them to do too much heavy lifting. But the problem with looking for a missing link in the story in order to understand our world—whether prehistoric past or rapidly devolving present—is that it assumes a clear causal chain, rather than a vast rhizomatic network of all the Earth’s inhabitants.
Endnotes
[1] Silvia Sebastiani, “A ‘Monster with Human Visage’: The Orangutan, Savagery, and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment,” History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 4 (2019): 81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119836619 [return]
[2] “Adam and Eve in Paradise,” New Directions Publishing, accessed January 20, 2025, https://www.ndbooks.com/book/adam-and-eve-in-paradise/ [return]
[3] Paige Madison, “Characterized by Darkness: Reconsidering the Origins of the Brutish Neanderthal,” Journal of the History of Biology 53, no. 4 (2020): 493-519. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09623-4 [return]
[Editor's Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Ed Morland during our annual Kickstarter.]