Before Adam – Jack London’s Weird Prehistoric Novel

This is a weird book!

This dude named John R. Hensley even wrote a whole-ass essay on how weird it is, called “Eugenics and Social Darwinism in Stanley Waterloo’s The Story of Ab and Jack London’s Before Adam,” and if you can track it down, it’s a pretty good (albeit pretty academic) read on what a doozy these two books are.

Hensley gets into how this guy Herbert Spencer believed that Social Darwinism meant your social status and wealth made you genetically superior. Not surprisingly, a lot of Spencer’s followers were members of the establishment, whether they were old-money royalty or first-generation elite. What a coinky-dink! And of course, the lighter one’s skin color was, the more “superior” they were.

Hensley talks about how in Waterloo’s book, the leap from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age basically takes place in the protagonist’s lifetime, where early man came up with the idea of the bow and arrow, domesticating wolves, and polishing stones within a couple decades, as opposed to however many tens of thousands of years. Of course, the ingenuity of whichever early man came up with these concepts made him “superior” to all the others, and that, in a nutshell, is Social Darwinism at play. Waterloo insisted that his book was rooted in “accepted theories and scientific research,” but according to Hensley, Waterloo was really just using big archeological and paleoanthropological words to justify his Social Darwinism beliefs.

Jack London’s Before Adam was heavily influenced by Waterloo and that Spencerian take on Social Darwinism, and even divides early man into separate “races” of Fire People (advanced) and Tree People (less advanced) and Folk, that group of early humans who were evolutionarily between the other two. London’s book is narrated by a young 20th century man who has vivid dreams of living life among his pre-human descendants. This is kinda touched on in Call of the Wild, where Buck draws on his “ancestral memory” as he indulges his animal instincts to evolve (or devolve) from a domesticated dog to a dog-wolf in the wild. But Before Adam calls this “racial memory,” a weirdly loaded and problematic term if there ever was one.

Anyway, again, this is a weird book! And while Jack London has certainly been problematic here and there, this is the first novel of his where he got problematic and also weird, and it’s probably the first of his to arguably be classified as science fiction. Typically, we think of science fiction as taking place in the future and in outer space, but this is a science fiction story that takes place a very long time ago here on Earth. It wouldn’t be the last time Jack London dabbled in science fiction; there is also the post-apocalyptic The Scarlet Plague (1912) and fantastical The Star Rover (1915). 



It’s not that the writing is terrible. This is a Jack London book, after all. But it’s definitely an unexpected entry in his prolific oeuvre, and not necessarily the banger that Call of the Wild or Martin Eden or The Sea-Wolf is. Proceed with caution if you’re expecting dogs.

Click on the cover image to buy Before Adam by Jack London!

We also covered other works of Jack London, including White Fang and Call of the Wild and Iron Heel and The Game and The Sea-Wolf and John Barleycorn and Before Adam and Martin Eden and A Daughter of the Snows and The Cruise of the Dazzler.

Cover Image Credit: Prehistoric rock image is by Krishnakulkarni36 and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license per Wikimedia Commons. The original image of the cave drawing is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons and has been colorized.

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