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🦋 Orce Man

Near the end of the fifth chapter of The Stone Raft, José and Joachim are in a tourist office in Granada getting directions from the newly introduced* Maria Dolores, who describes herself as "an anthropologist by training and a militant feminist by inclination." She asks if they are doing research on Orce Man, the fossilized skull discovered "some years ago" which is the oldest human fossil found yet in Europe.

There is an article about Orce Man at talkorigins.org which says it was discovered in 1982 and that in 1984 a symposium about it was cancelled when French scientists suggested the skull was probably not human. So perhaps this narrows down the setting of the novel to sometime around late 1983 or early 1984? It was published in 1986.

*(Anyway I don't think she was mentioned in the first chapter. Should go back and double-check.)

posted evening of Saturday, December 6th, 2008
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