Darkness and the Deep (1943) launched The Testament of Man with a powerful prologue covers the billions of years from the birth of the Earth to the appearance of the first hominids 6 million years ago. His principals are a Homo erectus family created when a resourceful younger member splits from his father's group. The protagonist, Wuh, and his mate Murah are joined by a second group of women taken from an old man's family. The book ends with an effecting death scene that suggests the beginnings of compassion.

Typically of the series, Fisher uses the story to illustrate the invention of various human artifacts — in this case, weapons, shelter-building, dance and language. His story is severely constricted by the limitations of language skills barely greater than those of the great apes, so the text is focused on behavior rather than conversation or, for that matter, thinking. The story is fascinating and engaging, but flawed by Fisher's obsessive insistence on mankind's essentially vicious nature. Repeatedly he asserts that his characters are without compassion, without altruism, utterly self-absorbed.

This obsession would be less noxious if Fisher treated his characters as individuals rather than types. They are to represent all mankind. With fictional license, his "genius" protagonists discover or invention a milennia of human developments. And not just mankind of the era, but all mankind. On every page Fisher asserts that his protagonists' behavior is merely a primitive manifestation of the contemporary human condition. For five million years, we have built our evolution viciousness, selfishness, violence, and vanity. It's not a bitter pill to swallow; only an estranged adolescent would fail to spit it out.

Foundational to his view is research on primates which within a few years would become utterly discredited by fieldwork. His source is the work of Robert Yerkes, famously the founder of the Yerkes primatology lab, less famously a hidebound racist and advocate of eugenics, and the creator of a test used to "determine" that roughly 50% of WWII GIs were "feebleminded." (Read the details in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.) His ideas regarding primates were based exclusively on observation of captive chimps (with a healthy sauce of racist folklore). It would be twenty years before Jane Goodall and her ilk used fieldwork to effectively demolish Yerkes' Hobbesian homilies about the Great Apes.

So, read as a piece of fiction, Darkenss and the Deep is interesting; as a historical fiction, deeply dubious.

The Golden Rooms (1944) moves to an imagined confrontation, 30-40 thousands years ago, between Neandertals and Homo sapiens. For many years, anthropologists mulled the idea that Neandertal extinction was the result of slaughter by Cro-Magnon (modern human) invaders of Europe. Today, there are many arguments to contradict this view, not least of which is the fact that the "slaughter" took more than 10,000 years and the fact that modern humans contain Neandertal DNA. But it is an idea that Fisher dramatizes with great success, linking the actions of the Cro-Magnons to contemporary racial prejudices.

One of his most effective strategies is to tell the story in two threads. First we meet and become engaged with the Neandertal family led by Harg, a young man who comes to dominate his group by discovering how to make fire. Aided by control of fire-making, the family progresses from scavenging meat and living off small game to successful attempts on big game (including a memorable killing of a mammoth). Following his pattern, Fisher uses Harg and his mother Marrig to dramatize a number of human milestones.

Then, after Harg observes a startling humanlike creature, the story shifts to the Cro-Magnons, typified by Gode, a young, cinematic (Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton once described the Cro-Magnon ascerbically as "the Frenchman's Aryan.") hunter whose innovative inheritance is the bow, clothing, and art. Before long, Gode discovers the Neandertals and soon decides that they are offense to nature (and his vanity). He gathers a handful of neighbors to embark on a round of ethnic cleansing. Because of our familiarity with Harg and his family, our horror is compounded when the family is massacred.

Fisher ends the novel with a twist. Having for the first time killed humans, Gode is slowly drawn to the idea of ghosts, and the novel concludes with his Edenic life sinking into a demon-haunted Hell.

I am covering these two books together because unlike the rest of the books in the series, they are roughly set in the same time. That is a sort of misnomer, because the "time" is unidentifiable. Like The Golden Rooms, it is before the flourishing of agriculture and pastoralism, although the women of both novels do plant grains in a limited way, and Intimations of Eve concludes with the acquisition of a goat for its milk. Say, then that if The Golden Rooms is set around 30,000 BCE, then these books are between that time and the rise of urbanism around 10,000 years ago. The setting is equally equivocal. The protagonists are "pale," suggesting Europe, but the environment is an odd collage of tropical and temperate.

In some ways, the books are interchangeable. With Intimations of Eve, the protagonist is an indolent fellow named Raven tyrannized by the women on his family. In Adam and the Serpent a young man named Owl and another named Dove are tyrannized by the women of their village. Villages are invented in the interim between the two books, and one of plot threads of Adam and the Serpent is the battle for control of the village between the elder women, Rainmaker and Firetaker.

One thing that you will begin to recognize after four books is that there will be a protagonist who is a young, creative genius (inventor, respectively, of hunting, fire, warfare, amulets and patriarchy — admittedly an odd congerie of developments, but crucial to Fisher's theme of the development of modern man). The protagonist will be an obnoxious, unlikeable fellow distinguished from his male society by imagination; his fellows are thugs and his female relatives will be complacent homebodies. The entire society will be governed by vanity, selfishness, cruelty, and fear.

The troublesome thing that can't be ignored is Fisher's fanatical conviction of an anthropological anachronism, the notion of oppressive matriarchy. In both books, men are submissive to women. Their submission is grounded in the fact that women make babies and men, they think, have no part in it. The first four books take place in a world where humans are unaware that it takes sperm to make babies. It is a comforting fantasy but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The question of where — and how — men discovered their role in procreation is left unanswered, but the idea that it was a late discovery doesn't make much sense. Fisher can't fairly be faulted for not knowing things we know now, but building his thesis on discredited anthropology makes the books terribly dated.

It's pretty clear that male animals, all the way down to insects, have at least an instictive notion that sexual intercourse gives them an investment in the offspring. Fisher's answer to this is unpersuasive; he would have us believe that people just copulated because it was fun. That's a bright light in his Hobbesian universe. There is no anthropological evidence of a universal cultural moment in which women ruled by virtue of their possession of child-making. There are matriarchal cultures, and the Israelites battled endlessly with female goddesses, but no evidence of totalitarian feminism.

That said, the story lines of all the first four novels are interesting and engaging, if marred by Fisher's one-note misanthropy.