Boneland‘s Watcher: a Neanderthal, probably
For the five or so people for whom it might be useful, the below collects together assorted thoughts re: the plausible species for the stone-age Watcher of the Edge.
The Watcher narrative (full text here) itself gives us a fairly clear ecological history. His world used to contain people and herds; then the cold/disruption comes, the herds go, and the people follow them. The Watcher remains. As he ages, he finds former habitation but “no one, nor any sign of a one.” Eventually he concludes that he is the last. Much later he sees smoke at the distant Hill of Death and Life, undertakes the difficult journey there, and discovers another population.
So the basic pattern is:
populated landscape → climatic/ecological disruption → migration/depopulation → isolated remnant (Watcher) → discovery of another human population elsewhere.
That resembles the sort of glacial refugium / population fragmentation story we might expect from the late Pleistocene.
The Watcher as Neanderthal
The narrative seems to point most naturally toward the late Neanderthal–early Homo sapiens overlap. Garner’s reconstruction suggests the Watcher as a member — perhaps the last local survivor — of a late Neanderthal population, living in a climatically unstable northern British landscape from which both game and people have progressively disappeared. His journeys take him through places that were inhabited within cultural memory but are now empty.
Eventually, after travelling a meaningful distance beyond his habitual terrain, he discovers another population of humans. Their appearance is so profoundly alien that he has difficulty apprehending them as individual people at all. Their language, technology and relationship with wolves are all unfamiliar.
Several critical treatments I’ve come across that attempt to identify the Watcher taxonomically would have him be Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, apparently by simply identifying his age with that of the c. 500,000-year-old handaxe. It’s an obvious enough inference if one has the good sense not to spend several days investigating the population dynamics of the Middle and Late Pleistocene in order to identify a fictional hominin, but I no longer have that advantage.
More fundamentally, the text explicitly discourages us from identifying the Watcher with the handaxe. We’re told that the Watcher does not make the Stone: it’s already an ancient sacred object within his inherited cosmology, whose visible working is attributed to Crane at “the Beginning.” Dating the Watcher from the artefact therefore creates rather than solves the archaeological problem. At that depth in the Middle Pleistocene, there simply aren’t two human populations available whose encounter plausibly matches what the narrative describes: an isolated remnant meeting another, profoundly different human type, accompanied by human-domesticated wolves.
(If we’re stretching, one could try to rescue the Homo erectus-ish reading by supposing that Garner has simply collapsed hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory. Temporal weirding is hardly alien to Garner; it’s one of his favorite imaginative operations. But that would be an oddly crude and banal version of it. He doesn’t usually make history weird by falsifying chronology; he does it by making chronology insufficient. His characteristic method is to begin with archaeological, astronomical and mythological materials that are real, or at least historically plausible, and preserve their historical integrity even as he destroys their temporal isolation: different periods become simultaneous, co-located, mutually permeable, or ecstatically enfugued. That is importantly different from inventing an event that could never have occurred and explaining the impossibility by appeal to weird time. He constructs the mythology that brings historically grounded pieces into impossible relation; the impossibility lies in the relation, not ordinarily in the pieces themselves. The Watcher’s encounter, moreover, is presented as an event within a legible prehistoric sequence — isolation after ecological disruption, migration, journey, contact — not as an irruption of one archaeological period into another. Where that sequence admits a historically coherent encounter between two profoundly different human populations, there seems little reason to replace it with an impossible meeting between species separated by hundreds of thousands of years. Garner’s stranger move is not to make an impossible prehistory possible, but to make possible prehistories impossibly present to one another.)
So once all this has been worried to death, the simpler reading is just: the handaxe is already (somehow) immensely ancient in the Watcher’s time, that the Watcher himself belongs to the late Neanderthal world, and that the sequence ends in an encounter between a surviving Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens.
What Garner could have known
This reconstruction is problematic, in ways that are very boring to me, in light of miscellaneous evidence and reassessments that have appeared since Boneland was published in 2012. But we can’t anachronistically judge the novel by evidence Garner could not have known at the time, so we can gratefully skip over all that.
Garner dates the germ of Boneland to the aftermath of Strandloper (1996), when encounters with adults who had grown up with the Weirdstone books persuaded him that readers experienced the sequence as unfinished. (Whether he decided then and there that he would “finish” it with something like the perversely unsentimental sabotage of wish-fulfillment that characterizes Elidor is unclear, but I digress.)
Thursbitch occupied him in the intervening years; only after its publication in 2003 did Boneland become the principal project. To a well-read archaeological enthusiast writing around 2003–11, something very close to the Neanderthal refugium scenario outlined above — including a kind of baton-passing of cultural knowledge between human groups — was very much in the air.
The broad rehabilitation of Neanderthals comfortably predates Boneland. By the 1980s, and especially the 1990s, the old stooped, brutish, cognitively deficient Neanderthal was being dismantled. Debates over burial, care of injured individuals, sophisticated hunting and technology, symbolic behaviour, language, and the degree of Neanderthal/modern-human difference were already well established.
By the period when Garner first conceived Boneland, “we profoundly underestimated Neanderthals” had become an established intellectual and popular-cultural meme. It’s not hard to imagine that this might have supplied some of the romance of the premise for the Watcher. His sequence can readily be understood within this late-twentieth-century project of trying imaginatively to restore interiority to archaic humans.
Garner could well have been animated by questions like: What if we entered the consciousness of the supposedly primitive human rather than looking at him from outside? What if his world were intellectually, technologically and spiritually complete?
And what would we look like to him?
That’s a very Garnerian inversion. Garner effectively reverses the museum diorama: we experience sapiens as the strange new hominin because our consciousness has been placed inside the other one.
A possible chronology
So, disregarding the breezy reading that seems insupportable, the narrative can plausibly fall into a neat-ish late Pleistocene cluster:
- ~500,000 years ago: an archaic human, probably H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis, makes the handaxe.
- Much later, perhaps ~45–40,000 years ago: the Stone has entered the ritual inheritance of the Watcher’s people. The Watcher belongs to a late Neanderthal population living at the climatic and demographic margins of its world. Herds and people have departed; formerly inhabited places stand empty; deaths within his own group eventually leave him alone.
- At roughly the Neanderthal–sapiens transition: the Watcher travels beyond his familiar territory and encounters another human population, plausibly early Homo sapiens. Their morphology is sufficiently unfamiliar that his ordinary categories of human individuality fail him. Their speech and technology differ from his, and they have begun a proto-domestication relationship with wolves that he interprets as the animals having had their spirits broken.
- Modern period: the same handaxe reaches Colin. It seems to refuse to occupy the chronological place assigned to it, appearing immediately beneath the turf in a geological context where Colin says it should not be.
The Stone refuses the timeline
That final point reminds us, again, to be ever suspicious of tidiness. Boneland gives us enough archaeological specificity to make the late-Neanderthal model persuasive, but the novel itself sabotages straightforward stratigraphy. Archaeological time, for Garner, is never just a sequence of sealed historical layers.
The Stone is not just old. It is repeatedly out of time: unimaginably ancient within the Watcher’s cosmology, perhaps already archaeologically ancient during his lifetime, and then discovered by modern people in a layer in which an object of its age should neither occur nor have survived.
The archaeological evidence invites us to arrange the past into successive strata, while the Stone keeps passing between them. So the Neanderthal reconstruction may be the best way of understanding the prehistoric materials Garner has assembled without necessarily being a chronological code that solves them. And it leaves intact something that most of Garner’s work is determined not to surrender: deep time doesn’t behave itself. Garner can construct a perfectly coherent Neanderthal/sapiens encounter and then place within it an anomalous object.
Deep place, not deep time
That object’s passage through conventional chronology embodies the metaphysics articulated by Colin when he rejects linear, unidirectional time as an adequate description of reality, calling the “Arrow of Time” merely the form human beings have adopted because it is cognitively useful.
“How,” “where” and “when,” he argues, become dubious categories at the limits of physics; on the Edge, “we may end at the start.” His distinction between “deep space” and “deep place” is still more suggestive: “Once place is lost, you fall into history.”
The Watcher can belong to history; the Stone belongs to deep place.