Com base na sua breve descrição, isso também poderia ser o romance de Jack London de 1907 Antes de Adam . Você pode ler o texto original em inglês completo no Wikisource , ou o mesmo no Project Gutenberg .
Este romance conta a história de um protagonista em primeira pessoa que tem sonhos vívidos em que ele experimenta as memórias de um ancestral em particular que viveu há alguns milhões de anos atrás.
Uma longa explicação de ficção científica é dada no capítulo 2 . Esta explicação menciona a evolução e afirma claramente que o protagonista herdou as memórias através de sua linhagem de ancestralidade. O livro não menciona o DNA pelo nome especificamente, em vez disso, culpa "o que Weismann denomina o 'germoplasma'", mas isso não é surpreendente, pois a genética molecular só foi descoberta algumas décadas depois da publicação deste romance. Vou citar algumas das explicações abaixo.
[From Chapter 1.] And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw and knew every different leaf.
[From chapter 2.] It was not till I was a young man, at college, that I got any clew to the significance of my dreams, and to the cause of them. […] But at college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange mental states and experiences. For instance, there was the falling-through-space dream--the commonest dream experience, one practically known, by first-hand experience, to all men.
This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated back to our remote ancestors who lived in trees. With them, being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching branches as they fell toward the ground.
Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was productive of shock. Such shock was productive of molecular changes in the cerebral cells. These molecular changes were transmitted to the cerebral cells of progeny, became, in short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness just before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by cerebral changes into the heredity of the race.
[…] It will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died immediately, before they could have progeny. You and I are descended from those that did not strike bottom; that is why you and I, in our dreams, never strike bottom.
[…] yet it is not myself that I see but one that is only remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are parts of me less remote. This other-self of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
[…] I possess the memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor.
No entanto, a parte da sua pergunta sobre "se estende mais e mais para a pré-história" não corresponde.