The Inheritors: a book review

You quickly realize that the people are not entirely human. Their babies cling to the thick hair on their backs
To [sapiens], the people appear as large and especially noisy beasts.

There's another humanoid species this could describe possibly even more accurately (neanderthals was shorter than sapiens) the author might have heard stories about, even in 1955, for the stories go back a long way, and there were two or three flaps around 1924 and 1929, long before before the patterson-gymlin footage gave them a name in popular consciousness. (Caveat: ^[1])

Deep sasquatch lore maintains that this very story is still playing out, for them, that the reason none have been captured in recent history is that they know what we are and they're very good at avoiding us, and even if they didn't have language (though they are said to have it, and there are audio recordings that've been studied by forensic speech analysts and said to be impossible for humans to have produced) almost all of them would quickly learn through hearing and observing that humans can kill anything they can see with a loud crack from a distance. Their senses are naturally keener than ours (they see us before we see them), they can cover ground much faster than us (if they don't want to be seen, they'll be gone before we know they were ever nearby), and they bury their dead (the kinds of soils they'd choose for the burial have zero overlap with the kinds of soils that can produce fossils.) (There are evolutionary reasons I'd expect an animal in this niche to consistently do burials, expounded below).
It's sometimes said that they are an animal who knows that they are an animal.

Aside from the absence of compelling video evidence (the fact that they haven't been seen on trailcams a bunch stands out to me as sus. Why would they avoid trailcams? One can think of reasons, but it gets a little contrived), the behaviours of bigfoot as they're described are very self-consistent as a profile of a north american bipedal ape. Bipedalism implies efficient walking, which implies large ranges, which implies intelligence (to remember what's in the range, and all of the other individuals who intersect with it, and their relationships, and to make long term plans to traverse all of these things as the seasons turn), which implies being very good at being elusive, first eluding older males and then being able to apply those skills to eluding us. And the sparse, porous, intersecting ranges implies a need to bury dead family members in order to hide the occurrence of the death from neighbouring rivals, to (at first) delay and (in equilibrium) amortise the opportunistic territory disputes that would come as a result of rivals realising that one of the protectors of the territory is no longer there.^[2]

^{^}
Although, I don't know whether the author could have encountered the kind of lore we have today. Native accounts might not have been sufficiently detailed to conclude that sasquatch were people. Ime native accounts of interactions in isolated wilderness are still very different from the kind of accounts you get from stories coming out of national parks.
^{^}
To test this theory a little, I went looking for evidence of burial in other pack species. As it happens, wolves sometimes do it. They go to small efforts to hide and sometimes cover their dead, but they are smaller efforts, which makes sense given that their territories are less porous (rivals are less likely to come across the body), the deaths are less important (old wolves are less active) the smell of a dead wolf doesn't carry so far as the smell of a dead sasquatch (which is a really enormous load of meat), and there's some amount of risk to grasping a dead conspecific in your mouth.
But also, for other species, it's just a lot harder or less important to hide the death. Bands of chimps or gorillas are either not very weakened by the loss of a member or are so weakened (dissolved or fragmented) that it can't be hidden. Wolves likewise seem fairly willing to advertise their numbers via howling, though howling patterns also seem to be carefully adapted to obfuscate the number of wolves involved so idk, I don't know whether it's successful at that to a wolf's ear, if so, probably only in larger numbers, situations where individual deaths aren't as important.

[-]1a3orn2mo71

I can't end this review without saying that The Inheritors is one step away from being an allegory in AI safety. The overwhelming difference between the old people and the new people is intelligence.

I mean, while it may be compelling fiction:

The relative intelligence of homo sapiens and neanderthals seems kinda unclear at the moment. They actually had larger brains than humans, and I've read hypotheses that they were smarter. They cooked with fire, built weapons, very likely had language, etc.
The Inheritors was published in 1955. It looks like in it the Neanderthals don't, for instance, hunt large mammals, but Wikipedia says this is an old misconception and we now believe them to have been apex predators.
There are numerous hypotheses about why homo sapiens outcompeted neanderthals, some hinging on, for instance, boring old things like viruses and so on.

So I think it a bad idea to update more from this than one would from a completely fictitious story.