Name: A Bone from a Dry Sea
ISBN: 9780440219286

Peter Dickinson

Two parallel stories present a young prehistoric female who is instrumental in advancing her people and a modern-day girl who joins her father, a paleontologist, in discovering important fossil remains in Africa. Reprint. AB. NYT. SLJ. H.

A Bone from a Dry Sea

Meagan Fischer 

This book has everything. It is told in two time periods, one of them a speculative pre-historic fictional tale about a sea-ape girl ("Li"), based on the idea put forth by Elaine Morgan that humans went through a period of evolution in which we spent considerable time in water.

I don't want to give any more details about that because it is at heart a simple story, but one full of discoveries and wonder. Dickinson really transported me back in (hypothetical) time to when this girl lived. The "science" of the prehistoric narrative is not necessarily reliable, but that isn't the point. It is more about imagining what it might have been like to be a being not truly human, but not truly "ape" either. It is very immersive. 

Meanwhile, in the present day, a young girl goes to visit her estranged father on an archaeological dig - in the very same site where Li once lived. As the team digs up fossils of clams and pigs and other mysterious objects, they try to put together the story of Li's tribe, but with so incredibly much information missing. 

There is a lot of commentary on the politics of academia, and subtext about how our interpersonal dynamics may not have changed so very much over the course of hundreds of millions of years. There's even a bit of discussion about colonialism and the ethics of foreign archaeologists running digs in previously colonized countries. Like I said, this book has everything! But at the same time, it is really a quite simple story and you can probably read it in just a day or two.
 
I recommend it and would love to hear anyone's thoughts if you choose to read it.