The Sense of an Endling: Paleofiction, Climate Change, and Human Extinction

ABSTRACT: This essay explores an analogy between existential climate threats to Neanderthals and those to modern humans, comparing how scientific and fictional narratives address challenges of chronological scale and material cause. Scientific accounts of Neanderthals' extinction and modern humans' persistence have followed three narrative models: evolution in place, encounter and replacement, and recently, climate change. Paleofictions concerning Neanderthal extinction have typically been structured on the encounter model, casting Neanderthals as "fossil others." The climate model poses an alternative, refusing the encounter model's assumption of modern humans' superiority. When augmented by fictional narration, the climate model enables readers to think into the chronological scale of climate change. Taking up this model to think through the Neanderthal-human analogy, the essay examines the prospect of cli-fi before turning speculatively to the manifesto as a more hopeful form to address our climate emergency.