A novel where evolution from Neanderthals to us, and from us to superhumans is just by shedding facial skin to become less prognathous

Question

I read this novel about 20 years ago, in English. Even though the science is horribly wrong (which did bother me a lot) it is really a great novel. It starts with an anthropologist finding that Neanderthals became Homo sapiens sapiens with a less prognathous face just by shedding facial skin and flesh. As if shedding skin and flesh would affect the shape of the skull ! And we are not direct descendents of Neanderthals. And evolution does not work so fast, over a single individual....

Moreover, in this novel, the fact that, once more, some people start losing facial skin and flesh and become even less prognathous than us is taken as the onset of a new (and rapid) evolution to a new stage of mankind, beyond us, the ordinary Homo sapiens sapiens.

How the author, on that absurd premise, repeated twice at an interval of many tens of thousand years, manages to write such a gripping novel is really a "tour de force".

Answer 1

I think you're thinking of Greg Bear's 1999 novel Darwin's Radio

From the Wikipedia page:

Built into the human genome are non-coding sequences of DNA called introns. Certain portions of those "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated and are translating numerous LPCs (large protein complexes). The activation of SHEVA and its consequential sudden speciation was postulated to be controlled by a complex genetic network that perceives a need for modification or to be a human adaptive response to overcrowding. The disease, or rather, gene activation, is passed on laterally from male to female as per an STD. If impregnated, a woman in her first trimester who has contracted SHEVA will miscarry a deformed female fetus made of little more than two ovaries. This "first stage fetus" leaves behind a fertilized egg with 52 chromosomes, rather than the typical 46 characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens.

During the third trimester of the second stage pregnancy, both parents go into a pre-speciation puberty to prepare them for the needs of their novel child. Facial pigmentation changes underneath the old skin which begins sloughing off like a mask.

This review confirms the Neanderthal connection:

Discredited anthropologist Mitch Rafelson has made an astonishing discovery in a recently uncovered ice cave in the Alps--the mummified remains of a Neanderthal couple and their newborn, strangely abnormal child.