The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man

The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man is an early work of prehistoric fiction, following Ab from boyhood into the violent responsibilities of hunter, lover, and tribal survivor. Waterloo blends adventure romance with speculative anthropology, imagining Paleolithic customs, tools, dangers, and social bonds through a brisk, episodic narrative. Its style is vigorous, pictorial, and characteristically late-Victorian, shaped by the era's fascination with Darwinism, archaeology, and humanity's origins. Stanley Waterloo, an American journalist and novelist, brought to the book a reporter's appetite for incident and a popular writer's instinct for drama. Working in a period when newspapers, museums, and scientific lectures made prehistory newly vivid to the public imagination, he transformed contemporary evolutionary ideas into accessible narrative. His interest lies less in strict science than in dramatizing the emergence of courage, ingenuity, rivalry, and affection as human traits. Readers interested in the history of adventure fiction, evolutionary thought in literature, or nineteenth-century imaginings of deep time will find this novel especially rewarding. Though modern anthropology has surpassed many of its assumptions, the book remains a compelling artifact of its age and an energetic meditation on what civilization imagined as its beginnings.