A Bone From a Dry Sea (21st Century Reference)

From Publishers Weekly
PW's starred review commended the "gripping" narrative, in which scientific speculation, a feminist slant and a school of helpful dolphins coalesce in the tales of dual heroines born more than two million years apart. Ages 12-up. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
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). (Fiction. 11+) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Card catalog description
In two parallel stories, an intelligent female member of a prehistoric tribe becomes instrumental in advancing the lot of her people, and the daughter of a paleontologist is visiting him on a dig in Africa when important fossil remains are discovered.


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Li, a female child in a tribe of "sea-apes" living some four million years ago, and Vinny, teenage daughter of a modern-day paleontologist, are the protagonists of alternating third-person stories, one extrapolating what life might have been like for an intelligent youngster in prehistoric times and the other demonstrating the difficulty of interpreting ancient shards. Li's narrative centers on the growth of her awareness of self and intellectual curiosity in relation to the other, less self-aware, members of her tribe, which lived and foraged along the African shore, "taking more and more to the water, changing in many ways." On a summer visit with her father at the now dry land site of what was once a sea, Vinny becomes involved in the search for fossils and the piecing together of shards and is caught up in the divisiveness between her father and the team leader. While both narratives convey a sense of reality, Li's, the more touching story, suffers at times from didacticism and authorial interference; however, characterizations are well fleshed out, and the parallels between the distant past and the present are drawn with conviction. All in all, a fascinating fictional look at a controversial theory of evolution.


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