Inherit the Stars

Inherit the Stars, James P. Hogan, Del Rey Books, 1977

In the near future, mankind has started to spread throughout the solar system; among other things, establishing several moon bases. One day, a very old, almost skeletal, corpse is found on the moon dressed in a red spacesuit. Calls to the other bases reveal that no one is reported missing. Things get really interesting when tests on the corpse, nicknamed "Charlie", reveal that it is at least 50,000 years old.

Interest shifts from the moon to Texas, headquarters of the United Nations Space Arm. The world's finest scientists are brought in, and they get a pretty clear idea about Charlie pretty quickly. He was human, or close enough to not make a difference. The next step is to speculate that he came from Earth, that there was a space-faring civilization here during the time of the earliest humans. If that is true, why is there no evidence that such a race ever existed?

While each separate department at UNSA, like linguistics or biology, is busy on their own piece of the puzzle, they aren't talking to each other. A tidbit from one department may be just what some other department needs. Victor Hunt, co-inventor of the Magniscope (the next generation in machines to look inside the human body) is brought in to be that link between departments. He is also good at thinking sideways, getting each department out of their own rigid dogma. Further research shows that the planet Minerva, between Mars and Jupiter, was dying; an ice age was coming. The need to leave turned into a major interplanetary war, with weapons that could vaporize cities in an instant. Things get very interesting with the discovery of a very large alien spaceship, not from Charlie's race, under the ice on Ganymede.

This novel gets pretty heavy on the science, but at least it's easily understandable. Here is a very good and thought-provoking story about the origins of mankind.