Hominids

Hominids is a science fiction novel by the Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer, published in 2002. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the following year.

The book sets two intelligent species side by side. One is ours. The other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they rather than we became the dominant people, and their civilisation has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own while resting on radically different assumptions about society and philosophy.

Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally breaks through the barrier between the two universes and is transferred into ours. People recognise what he is long before they accept that he is a colleague, and he is quarantined and studied, alone and bewildered, until a doctor, a physicist and a Canadian geneticist named Mary Vaughan begin to treat him as a person rather than a specimen.

His own world does not stand still while he is gone. His partner, Adikor Huld, is left with a disordered laboratory, no body and neighbours who suspect him, and finds himself on trial for murder with no idea what became of the man he is accused of killing.