West of Eden

Stone age humans versus intelligent reptiles.

• Dinosaurs

• Stone Age

1. West of Eden
2. Winter in Eden
3. Return to Eden

• The Yilané are supposed evolved from mosasaurs, a group of large marine reptiles that in reality went extinct at about the same time as dinosaurs. I don't know why Harry Harrison made this decision, as it seems very odd, especially since he could have chosen any one of numerous species of dinosaur as an ancestor instead.
  
  Many readers also make the mistake of describing the Yilané as dinosaurs - they're not! Not all large reptiles were dinosaurs! (I don't recall Harry Harrison making this mistake in the text).
  
  
• If the Yilané were evolved from mosasaurs (whose limbs had evolved into flippers), how did they back-evolve hands? Dollo's Law states the evolution is not substantively reversible because it's too statistically improbable. (To be fair, there have been some challenges made to Dollo's Law).
  
  
• Why are the dinosaurs depicted as slow-moving cold-blooded reptiles? Even in the 1980s, when these novels were written, a view of the dinosaurs as warm-blooded creatures was becoming more mainstream.
  
  
• Why are the dinosaurs (and apparently all reptiles in the story) poisonous to humans? In our timeline, humans have no trouble eating turtle, alligator, iguana or snake.
  
  
• I may well be mistaken, but I think that some of the dinosaurs featured were already extinct long before the KT boundary (65 million years ago when the asteroid hit the Earth).
  
  
• Despite mammals being confined to a small corner of the world, and presumably having evolved by a completely different route (for example, no large mammal species is supposed to have evolved in the z), they seem surprisingly similar to our timeline's mammals.
  
  
• Personally I couldn't quite accept the Yilané society. They are an advanced technologically sophisticated species, but do not use fire as part of their technology. Similarly, despite having relatively advanced technologies like submarines, they don't seem to have previously explored North America - it's worth remembering that our timeline's humans were able to occupy the whole of the Americas and Australia using nothing more than stone age technology.

West of Eden By Harry Harrison Bantam Released: 1984-07-01 Hardcover (483 pages) List Price: $15.95* Lowest New Price: $59.84* Lowest Used Price: $0.01* *(As of 20:51 Pacific 18 May 2012 More Info) Click Here Product Description: This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result.