Evolution (44 page)

But that large body size and big brain came at a price. She had been born with her development incomplete, because that was the only way her head would have squeezed through her mother’s birth canal. She had been born premature. Unlike the apes and even the pithecines, walker infants could not forage for themselves until long after weaning: aside from their physical immaturity, the ability to exploit food sources like hunted meat, clams, and heavy-shelled nuts was not innate in the newborn, and so had to be learned. But at the same time the children of the walkers were being born into the predator hell of the savannah. So, while they were young, kids needed a lot of care.

These costly, dependent children made it difficult for the walker types to compete with the fast-breeding pithecines, with whom they often shared the same habitats. And that was why the walkers began to live longer.

Most pithecine females, like the apes before them, died not long after their fertility ended— indeed, few long outlived their last birth. Walker women, and men, began to live for years, even decades after their reproductive career was apparently over. These grandmothers and grandfathers began to play a crucial role in shaping walker society. They helped with the division of labor: They helped their daughters care for the children, they helped gather food, they were essential in passing on the complex information required by the walkers to survive.

All this had required a new efficiency in body design. Walker bodies were much better than pithecines’ at maintenance and longevity— all save their reproductive systems; a forty-year-old walker woman’s ovaries were as badly degenerated as would be the rest of her body at age eighty, if she lived that long.

Crucially, the grandmothers’ support meant their daughters could afford to have children more often. That was how the walkers outcompeted the pithecines and apes. Almost all walker children survived long after weaning. Almost all pithecine infants did not.

For the pithecines the emergence of this new form was a disaster. Walkers and pithecines were too close cousins to share the ecology easily. There were few direct conflicts between the types of people: Sometimes pithecines hunted walkers or walkers hunted pithecines, but they found each other too smart and dangerous a prey to be worth the trouble. But in ages to come the walkers— big-brained, flexible, mobile— would slowly drive their smaller-brained cousins to extinction.

Toolmaking and even consciousness were, ultimately, no guarantee of survival.

Of course it need not have happened. If not for the fluctuation of the climate, the chance isolation of Far’s ancestors, there might have been no mankind: nothing but pithecines, upright chimps screeching and making their crude tools and waging their petty wars for millions of years more, until the forests disappeared altogether, and they succumbed to extinction.

Life always had been chancy.

Far spent the night alone, cold, drifting through an uneasy sleep.

The next day, as she tried to join in the group’s activities, a woman, heavily pregnant, glared into her eyes, an ancient primate challenge. Was Far here to take food that might otherwise reach the belly of her unborn child?

Far felt more isolated than ever. She had no ties with anybody here. There was no reason why they should share their space, their resources with her. It wasn’t as if this place was brimming with riches. And now even Ax seemed to be rejecting her.

As the afternoon wore on she was the first to return, alone, to the hollow in the sandstone outcrop. She tucked herself into the peripheral corner she had come to think of as her own.

But she noticed some lumps of crimson rock scattered deeper at the back of the hollow. She picked them up, turning them over curiously. Their redness was bright in the daylight, and they were soft. They were lumps of ocher, the iron red of ferric oxide. Someone had been attracted by their color and, on impulse, brought them here.

She saw scrapes of red on scattered basalt rocks at the back of the hollow: red the same color as the ocher, red like blood. Experimentally she pushed the ocher over the rock, and was startled to see more bloody streaks smear over the rock surface.

For long minutes she played with the bits of ocher, not really thinking, her clever fingers working by themselves to add their own meaningless scribbles to the scrawls on the rock.

Then she heard the hollers of the people as they started to drift back to their temporary base. She dropped the bits of ocher where she had found them, and made for her corner.

But the palms of her hands were bright red: red like blood. For an instant she thought she had cut herself. But when she licked her palms she tasted salty rock, and the scraping of ocher came away.

Red like blood.
A tentative connection formed in her mind, a chink of light shining between her compartments of thought.

She went back to the bits of ocher. Now she tried scraping them over the back of her hands, where she made a hatchery of lines, and on the healing pithecine cut on her shoulder, which she made bright red again.

And she marked herself between her legs— marking her skin red like blood, as if she were bleeding, as she had seen her mother bleed.

She went back to her corner and waited until the light faded. As the people tended and crooned to each other, she huddled over and tried to sleep.

Someone approached: warm, breathing softly. It was Ax. She could smell the dusty scent of rock chippings on his legs and belly. His eyes were pits of shadow in the fading light. The moment stretched. Then he touched her shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm, but she shivered. He leaned toward her and sniffed quietly, scenting her just as had Brow before she had become separated from her family.

She opened her legs, so he could see the “blood” in the fading light. She sat tense, watching him.

Her life hung on his acceptance; she knew that. Perhaps it was that basic desperation and longing, a longing for him to see her as a woman, which had driven her to come up with this peculiar deceit.

Unlike his forest-dwelling ancestors, Ax was a creature of sight, not smell; the message from his eyes overrode the warning of his nose. He leaned forward. He touched her shoulder, her throat, her breast. Then he sat beside her and his strong fingers began to comb through her tangled hair.

Slowly she relaxed.

Far stayed with Ax and his people for the rest of her life. But as long as she could, whenever she could— as she grew in wisdom and strength, as her children grew until they gave her grandchildren to protect and mold in turn— she ran, and ran, and ran.

Central Kenya, East Africa. Circa 127,000 years before present.

Pebble had found a yam vine. He bent and inspected it.

He was eight years old, naked save for smears of ocher on his barrel chest and broad face. He pulled out a little grass from around the yam’s base. This was a spot for yam, not grass, and it was best to keep it that way.

People had been here before to dig out these tubers. Perhaps he had even been here himself. At eight years old he had already covered every scrap of his people’s range, and he thought he remembered this spot, here between these eroded bluffs of sandstone.

He took his digging stick. This was a heavy pole shoved through a hole crudely bored in a small boulder. Despite the tool’s weight, he lifted it easily, and he used the mass of the boulder to ram the digger’s point into the hard ground.

Pebble was a solid slab of muscle built over a tough, robust skeleton. If Far, his long-dead, distant grandmother, had looked like a long-distance runner, Pebble might have been a junior shot-putter. His face was large, massive-featured, dominated by a great ridge of bone over his brow. He had a mountainous nose and large sinuses that gave his face an oddly puffed-out look. His teeth were flat-topped pillars of enamel. His skull, which would become considerably larger than Far’s, housed a large and complex brain— in fact comparable in size to a modern human’s— but it sat much more directly behind his face than a human’s brain would have.

When he had been born, wet from the womb, Pebble’s body had been sleek and round, inspiring an odd image in his mother’s mind, a pebble worn by a stream. Names for people still lay far in the future— with just twelve people in Pebble’s group there was no need for names— but nevertheless this boy’s mother would often look on a glistening rock in a stream, and remember her child as he had been as a baby in her arms.

Pebble, then.

In this age there were many kinds of robust folk like Pebble’s spread through Europe and western Asia. Those who inhabited Europe would one day be called Neandertals. But just as in Far’s time, most of these new kinds of people would never be discovered, let alone understood, classified, linked to a hominid family tree.

His were a strong people, though. Even at eight years old, Pebble performed work essential to his family’s survival. He wasn’t yet up to joining the adults on the hunts, but he could dig out yams with the best of them.

The wind picked up a little, bringing him the delicious scent of wood smoke, of home. He went at his work with a will.

Already his digging had broken up the earth. He plunged his hands into the dry ground and began exposing a fat tuber that looked as if it might go down a long way, perhaps as deep as two meters. He went back to his digging stick. Bits of dust and rock flew up, sticking to his sweat-covered legs. He knew what to do with yams. When he had the tuber he would cut off the edible flesh, but then replace the tuber’s stem and top in the ground so that it would regrow. His digging aided the yam in more subtle ways, too. He was loosening and aerating the soil, further fostering regrowth.

His mother would be pleased if he brought home three or four fat tubers, ready to be thrown onto the fire. And yams were useful in a lot of other ways besides eating. You could use them to poison birds and fish. You could rub their juice into your head to kill the lice that crawled there . . . There was a crunching noise.

Startled, Pebble pulled back his digging stick. He leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the sun’s brightness, trying to see what was down there in the hole. It could be some deep-burrowing insect. But he could see nothing but a scrap of rust brown, like a bit of sandstone. He reached down and, his clumsy fingers stretching, grabbed the scrap and pulled it to the surface. It was a ragged-edged dome, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. When he held it up before his face two empty eye sockets peered back at him.

It was a skull. The head of a child.

That was no great horror. Children died all the time. This was a harsh place: There was little pity to spare for the weak and hapless.

But all the children who had died within Pebble’s own short lifetime had been put in the ground close to the huts. Like all the dead, they were buried to keep the scavengers from harassing the living. Perhaps this child was long dead, then. Perhaps its people had buried it here before Pebble was born, where the yam clump grew now.

But the skull was oddly fine, light. Pebble weighed it in his hand. Its brow was a heavy lid of bone, from which a forehead sloped back almost horizontally. Pebble ran a hand over his own scalp and compared the slightly bulbous swelling of his forehead. There were tooth marks in the little cranium, he saw: precise puncture wounds inflicted by the teeth of a cat— but inflicted after the child was already dead, its body abandoned on the plain.

Pebble could not know that he was holding the remains of the Brat, brother of Far, who had lived and died not far from here. The Brat had succumbed to his infant vitaminosis and died while still a child, without issue. It would have been little comfort to the Brat if he could have known that one day, when his brief, forgotten life was already more than a million years gone, his small head would be cradled in the hand of a remote great-nephew.

And the Brat would have recognized little of this landscape, the place where he had once played.

The geological infrastructure of the Rift Valley— the plateau, the rocks, the volcanic mountains, the great sweep of the valley itself— had been left largely unchanged by time. But since Far’s time this had become a sparse, dry place. Scattered stands of acacia, leadwood, and wild laurel had replaced the denser thickets and forest pockets of the past. Even the grasslands were subtly different, great swaths of them dominated by a handful of fire-resistant species. Meanwhile, the great animal communities of the past had imploded. There was not an elephant to be seen across this great dust bowl, not an antelope or giraffe. It was as if life had crashed here. The place was depleted. Far would have been startled by its impoverishment.

But the Brat’s wretched remains had left their mark on the world: a scrap of moisture trapped in that buried, upturned skullcap had been enough to help establish the yam.

Incuriously Pebble closed his fist. The little skull was crushed to thin shards, and he let the dust fall back into the hole. He reached for his digging tool; there was still some root to be dug out.