The Inheritors

The Inheritors by William Golding takes place in the paleolithic; the characters are a small group of Neanderthals who are making a yearly migration to their summer settlement.  The story mainly focuses on one of the men, Lok, and a female, Fa.  While at a rocky overhang where they stopped to make camp, one of their men goes missing - there was also the smell of people unknown to them.  The rest of the book centers around the conflict the Neanderthal band faces against our early ancestors, Homo sapiens.

These new people speak strangely, look different, and have strange ways of doing seemingly complex things.  The Neanderthals Golding provides for us as the primary characters are by no means the primitive, grunting ape-men often depicted in earlier literature and film, which I find a little surprising since it was published in 1962.  Lok and his people may not be using tools in the way the early humans do once they appear on the scene, and they are quite wary of being in water, but they have a definite intelligence, simple though it may seem to us.