Before Adam

Since childhood the narrator has been tormented by dreams of a world he never lived in — forests and cliffs, savage flight, half-human creatures. At last he understands them: they are inherited memories, the life of a remote ancestor surfacing in his sleep. Through this racial memory he relives the story of Big-Tooth, a youth of the Folk, an early hominid tribe of the Mid-Pleistocene.

Big-Tooth grows up between two other peoples — the apelike, tree-dwelling Tree-People below, and the taller, fiercer Fire-People beyond, who wield fire and bows and arrows and foreshadow true humanity. With his friend Lop-Ear and his mate Swift-One, Big-Tooth hunts and flees, discovers and survives, always at the mercy of predators, of the brutal atavist Red-Eye, and at last of the Fire-People themselves, whose coming spells the doom of the Folk.

Serialized in 1906–1907 and published in 1907, Before Adam is one of the earliest works of prehistoric fiction in English — a Darwinian adventure that dramatizes the descent of man and the kinship of human and animal, and an ancestor of the evolutionary science fiction that runs from H. G. Wells to William Golding.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s science and lasting power, a biographical note on Jack London, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.