The Neanderthal Codex
Status: Greenlit / Cycle: 1 / Job Board: Pending / Beta Room: (Under Construction)
“A 16th-Century monk discovers the plans for a time machine in an ancient codex, and is sent by the Pope to 300,000 BC as a reluctant missionary to Neanderthals.”
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The year is 1519. Brother Ignatius “Iggy” Agapitus has discovered a strange book in the monastery library. Within its pages are the designs for a most curious machine, as well as a phrase book of translations from an unknown language into Latin. There were faint scribbles in the margins, and cut into its pages was a rock as blue as a robin’s egg.
Because he was the curious sort, Brother Iggy, who liked to tinker and had filled the monastery grounds with ornate bird houses of his own design, followed the instructions and built the machine in the work shed in the courtyard, which took the better part of that year. The other brothers assumed the project was to be a large bird house, albeit one somehow powered by the monastery’s waterwheel.
The machine transports Iggy to a grassy steppe in the mid-Paleolithic Age, where he befriends a tribe of Neanderthals and teaches them Latin. Returning to the monastery, he overcomes his skeptics, and is eventually summoned to Rome, where he is commanded by Pope Leo X to return to the past and recruit a Neanderthal army for his latest crusade. Vatican officials debate the thorny issue of whether these cavemen are indeed men with souls, and are thus eligible to wage holy war, or pre-date Adam, are therefore soulless, and not subject to the whims of the infallible.
A test is devised, based on the theory that a body loses a small amount of weight at death due to the departure of the soul, and Iggy is sent with a weighing machine to settle the question - as well as the ultimate fate of the Neanderthals, not to mention all of church doctorine and holy writ.
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The Neanderthal Codex
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The Macguffin Company
