The Red Terror And The First Upturned Stone: A Novel of Stone Age Britain
It is 130,000 years ago in a place today we call Britain, during the Stone Age, when hunter-gatherers lived.
Swar, a young adventurous boy, lives with his tribe the Mesh people. He helps the men of the tribe to hunt wild beasts, the giant sloth, great cave bear, wooly mammoth, the wooly rhinoceros and the saber-toothed cat.
Hippopotamuses splash in the River Thames. Monkeys swing in the trees. Lions roam near what is today London.
A Cro-Magnon, Swar loves the beautiful Chelle, with whom he plans to mate. But Swar is forced to flee his tribe after his father is murdered by his evil brother, Tork. Swar is saved only by the intervention of a Neanderthal man named Mope.
Cro-Magnons look down on the Neanderthals and seek to enslave and annihilate them.
But the red terror intervenes, a giant, all-powerful presence, something all people fear. When they see it, they can’t believe their eyes.
This is a story of firsts, the first horse ride, the first racism, the first nation-state, the first religion and the abuse of it, the first ethnic cleansing, the first political scheming.
The theme: As much as the earth has changed since the first people walked on it, some things about people never change.