Evolution Page 24

  And on the plain there were many, many lakes, ponds, marshes. Mist rose everywhere, the sun’s early heat filling the air with moisture. A great river, having spilled from the southern highland, curled lazily over the plain. Around its banks stretched extensive floodplains, some of them marshy or sheets of open water. The land was like a full sponge, brimming with water. Some of the trees were dying, their roots in some cases actually standing in shallow water. The forest remnants, already shrunken by the world’s continuing cooling and drying, were being drowned.

  This soggy plain stretched to the north as far as Capo’s eyes could see. But off to the south the land climbed to an immense wall notched by the outflow of that mighty river. Before that great ridge was a more barren area littered with wide, bone-white sheets of salt, on some of which stood small, stagnant-looking lakes.

  There was a bellow from the north, and Capo turned back that way. The animals of the plain were going about their business. In the distance Capo could see what looked like a herd of wild, overgrown pigs rooting in the long grasses. Their low-slung gray-brown bodies made them look like huge slugs. They were not pigs or hippos; they were anthracotheres, a holdover from much more ancient times.

  Two huge chalicotheres worked their way slowly across the plain, plucking at shrubs with their huge paws. They picked only fresh shoots, and put them into their mouths, delicate as pandas. The taller, the male, was nearly three meters high at the shoulder. They had bulky bodies and stocky hind legs, but their forelegs were long and surprisingly graceful. But, because of their long claws, they could not put their front feet on the ground, and walked on their knuckles. In their bodies they looked a little like huge, short-haired gorillas, but they had long equine heads. These ancient animals were cousins of the horses. Once they had been widespread, but now the shrubs on which they depended were becoming scarce; this species was the last of the chalicothere kind.

  Closer to hand, the apes could hear a steady, noisy rustling. Hesitant, they peered out. A family of a kind of elephant was working at the trees at the forest clump’s edge, using their trunks to pull away branches and cram foliage into their mouths. These were gomphotheres, massive creatures. Each had four tusks, a pair protruding from both upper and lower jaws, giving its face the look of a forklift.

  This was the heyday of the proboscideans. The very successful elephantine body plan had spun off a whole range of species across the world. In North America the mastodons would survive until humans arrived. Another family was the shovel-tuskers like these gomphotheres, with their hugely expanded and flattened lower tusks. And, walking through Africa and southern Asia, there were the stegodons, with long, straight tusks. They were the ancestors of the true elephants and the mammoths, who had yet to appear.

  The sound of the gomphotheres’ calls, carrying far in the cold morning air and echoing deep into the infrasonic, was eerie. These particular proboscideans were omnivorous. They were scarcely fleet-footed hunters. But on the whole a meat-eating elephant was best avoided.

  That was when Frond, the spindly male, unexpectedly knuckle-walked out of the forest’s shade and into grass tall enough to come up to his shoulders. The grass waved around him, stirred by a breeze, languid waves crossing the empty acres.

  Hesitantly Frond got to his hind legs. For a heartbeat he stood upright, peering out into a world beyond the primates’ reach, out into the green emptiness where animals walked, the antelopes, elephants, and chalicotheres grazing the abundant grass.

  Then he dropped back to all fours and scuttled back into the forest’s shadows, his nerve gone.

  Capo gave him a sound beating about the head for taking such a risk. Then he led his troop back into the deeper forest.

  Capo hauled himself up an acacia tree, seeking fruit and flowers. Capo climbed steadily. He used a kind of shimmying style, pulling himself up with his arms while gripping the tree trunk with his feet to provide a platform.

  It was a feat Roamer could not have achieved — or indeed any monkey. Capo’s apes had flat chests, short legs, and long arms. They had achieved greater flexibility by moving their shoulder blades to the backs of their bodies, which enabled Capo to reach up above his head. All this was equipment for hauling oneself up a tree trunk. Where Roamer had spent much of her life running along branches, Capo was a climber.

  And this re-engineering for climbing had had another side effect, easily visible in Capo’s long, narrow body. Working vertically, with a new bone structure and system of balance, Capo was already preadapted to walking on two feet. Sometimes he did this in the trees, holding on to branches for balance, trying to reach the highest fruit — and sometimes his kind would stand up out in the open, as Frond had demonstrated.

  As their bodies had been redesigned, the apes had become smarter.

  In these tropical climes fruit trees rarely fruited simultaneously. Even when you found a fruiting tree, you might have a long way to travel to the next. So the apes needed to spend much of each day searching for patchy resources, foraging alone or in small groups, collecting together again to sleep in the treetop refuges. This basic architecture of food gathering had shaped their social lives. For one thing they needed to understand their environment very well if they were to find the food they needed.

  And, given the way they lived their lives, their bonding was loose. They could split and recombine, forming special relationships with other members of the community, even though they might not see them for weeks at a time. Keeping track of a multileveled, fissile social complexity required increasing smartness. As the apes juggled their relationships, it was as if they were living through a soap opera — but it was a social maelstrom that honed their developing minds.

  In the first years after the great split of the archaic anthropoid stock into apes and monkeys, the apes had become the Old World’s dominant primates. Though shrinking climate belts restricted them to the middle latitudes, there was plenty of room for them in a continuous band of forest that had spanned the whole of Africa and stretched across Eurasia from China to Spain. Following this green corridor the apes had walked out of Africa and spread through the Old World forests. In fact, they had migrated alongside the proboscideans.

  At their peak there were more than sixty ape species. They had ranged from cat-sized to the size of a young elephant. The largest, like the giants, were leaf eaters, the midsized — those the size of Capo — took fruit, but the smallest, weighing under a kilogram or so, were insectivores, like their remote ancestors. The smaller the animal, the faster its metabolism and the higher the quality of the food it demanded. But there was room for everybody. It had been an age of apes, a mighty anthropoid empire.

  Sadly for them it hadn’t lasted.

  As the world continued to cool and dry, the great forest belts had shriveled into isolated islands, like this one. The vanishing of forest connections between Africa and Eurasia had isolated the Asian ape populations, which would develop independently of events in Africa, into the orangutan and its relatives. With the reduced ranges had come a dwindling of numbers. Most ape species had, in fact, already long gone extinct.

  And then had come the rise of a new competitor.

  Capo reached a clump of foliage where, he knew, this particular acacia had an especially productive patch of flowers. But he found the spiny branches already stripped. When he pried them aside he was met by a small, startled black face, fringed by white fur and a gray topknot. It was a monkey — like a vervet — and juice dribbled from its small mouth. It peered into Capo’s eyes, squealed, and shot out of sight before he could do anything about it.

  Capo rested for a while, scratching his cheek thoughtfully.

  Monkeys were a pest. Their great advantage was that they were able to eat unripe fruit. Their bodies manufactured an enzyme to neutralize the toxic chemicals used by the trees to protect their fruit until their seeds were ready to germinate. The apes could not match this. So the monkeys were able to strip the trees before the apes even arrived. They were even m
oving out into the grasslands, feeding off the nutlike seeds to be found there. To the apes, the monkeys were as tough a competition as the rodents had always been.

  High over Capo’s head, a slim form moved, swinging gracefully and purposefully. It was a gibbon. It raced through its forest canopy at extraordinary speed. It used its body as a pendulum to gain momentum, and, like a child on a fairground swing, it pumped its legs up and down to build up its speed.

  The gibbon’s body was a kind of extreme version of the apes’ long-armed, flat-chested design. The ball-and-socket joints in its shoulders and wrists had been freed up so that the gibbon could hang from its arms and twist its body through a full circle. With its low weight and extreme flexibility, the gibbon could hang from the outermost branches of the highest trees, and it was able to reach the fruits that grew at the end of the thinnest branches, safe from even tree-climbing predators. And, able to hang upside down from branches, it could reach goodies out of the grasp of other apes, who were too heavy to climb so high, and even the monkeys, who ran along the tops of the branches.

  Capo peered up at the gibbon with a kind of envy for a grace, speed, and skill he could not match. But, magnificent though it was, the gibbon was not a triumph for the apes but a relic, forced by the competition it had lost to the monkeys to eke out its living on the ecological margins.

  Vaguely disappointed, still hungry, Capo moved on.

  At length Capo found another of his favorite resources, a stand of oil palms. The nuts of this tree had rich, oily flesh — but they were enclosed in a particularly hard outer case that rendered them immune to most animals, even the clever fingers of monkeys. But not to apes.

  Capo hurled handfuls of the nuts down to the ground, then clambered down after them. He collected the nuts together, carried them to the roots of an acacia he knew, and hid them under a heap of dried palm fronds.

  Then he worked his way out toward the perimeter of the forest, to where he had stashed his hammer-stones. These were cobbles that fit neatly into the palm of his hand. He selected one and headed back to his nut stash.

  On his way back he passed the adolescent Howl. Briefly he considered mating her again, but Capo’s attention once a day was enough of an honor for any female.

  Anyhow she was sitting with an infant, an odd-looking male with a peculiarly elongated upper lip: Elephant. He was actually one of Capo’s sons. He was sitting on the ground clutching his stomach and moaning loudly. Perhaps he had a worm, or some other parasite. Howl was moaning along with him, as if some of the pain had transferred to her body. She was plucking bristly leaves and making the youngster swallow them; the leaves contained compounds that were toxic to many parasites.

  And there were Finger and Frond, he saw, grubbing their way along the forest floor. The young males were aiming for a little light thievery, it seemed to Capo — in fact, he realized angrily, they had their eyes on Capo’s own heap of fronds.

  Capo contained his impatience. He sat under a tree, dropped his hammer-stone, picked up a stick and began to work methodically to clean out the spaces between his toes. He knew that if he made a dash for his palm nuts the others would get there first and pilfer the nuts. By loitering like this, he was making Frond and Finger believe that no nuts had been hidden at all.

  Unlike Roamer, Capo was able to read the intentions of others. And Capo understood that others could have beliefs different from his own, that his actions could affect others’ beliefs. It was a capability that even made a limited kind of empathy possible: Howl really had been sharing the suffering of Elephant. But it also made possible ever more elaborate modes of deceit and treachery. He was able, in a sense, to read minds.

  This new ability had even made him self-aware, in a new way. The best way to model the contents of another’s mind was to be able to study your own: If I saw what she sees, if I believed what she does, what would I do? It was an inward look, a reflection: the birth of consciousness. If Capo had been shown his face in a mirror he would have known it was him, not another ape in a window. His were the first animals since the hunters of Pangaea to have achieved such sophistication.

  At last Frond and Finger moved away from the stash. Capo grabbed his hammer-stone and descended on his palm nuts. Capo would deliver beatings to the two of them later anyhow, on principle; they would never quite understand why.

  He brushed aside the concealing fronds to expose his favorite anvil stone, a flat rock embedded in the ground. To protect his backside he spread some broad leaves over the moist ground. He sat down, legs tucked up to his chest. He set a palm nut on the anvil, holding it steady with finger and forefinger — and then brought down the hammer, snatching his fingers out of the way at the last moment. The nut rolled a little and squirted sideways unbroken; Capo retrieved it and tried again. It was a tricky procedure that took a lot of coordination. But it took Capo only three goes before he had cracked the first nut and was chewing out its flesh with his teeth.

  Twenty-seven million years after Roamer and her habit of slamming nuts against branches, this was the height of technology on Earth.

  Capo worked steadily on the nuts, losing himself in the tricky little procedure, pushing out of his mind the obscure worries that niggled him. It was high morning now, and for a time he felt content, satisfied in the knowledge that he had gotten enough food to stave off hunger pains for a few hours at least.

  Elephant, drawn by the nuts’ rich smell, came to see what was happening. This youngster’s stomach problem had evidently been eased by Howl’s rough-and-ready bush medicine — or perhaps he had been faking it, to get some attention — and he was starting to feel hungry. He made out bits of nutshell scattered around the anvil stone, and even a few scraps of kernel. The youngster snatched these up and crammed them into his mouth.

  Capo, grandly, let this pass.

  Now Leaf came by with her infant clinging to her back.

  Capo dropped his hammer-rock and reached for Leaf. Gently he began to groom her belly, an attention to which she submitted gracefully. Leaf, a big, gentle creature, was one of his favorite females. In fact she was favored by all of the troop’s males, and they would compete for grooming time with her.

  But that wasn’t Capo’s way. Very soon his lumpy penis had sprouted from his fur, and Leaf had had all the grooming she was going to get. Leaf carefully lifted the infant from her back and put her down on the ground. Then she lay back and let Capo enter her. She arched her back as he thrust, so that her head was upside down, her weight balanced on her skull. These apes often mated face to face like this. Empathy again: They could share each others’ pleasure in grooming or mating.

  Capo and Leaf were close. Though mating was promiscuous, sometimes Capo and Leaf would take themselves off into the forest for days on end — just the two of them — and during such safaris of tenderness, previsioning the sexual privacy of later kinds, most of Leaf’s children by Capo had been conceived, including Elephant.

  What Capo and Leaf felt for each other at such moments as this was nothing like human love. Each of the apes remained locked inside a wordless prison; their “language” still wasn’t much more sophisticated than a cry of pain. But they were among the least lonely creatures on the planet, the least lonely who had ever lived.

  Meanwhile young Elephant pored over Capo’s tool kit. He started tapping nut against cobble, cobble against anvil.

  Capo’s apes, as they grew from infancy, had much to learn about their environment. They needed to learn where to find water and food, how to use occasional tools to get at the food, how to apply their simple bush medicine. They had been driven to live this way, in fact, because of competition from the monkeys: They had to figure out how to extract food the monkeys couldn’t steal, and that took smarts.

  But there was no schooling here. It wasn’t that Elephant was trying to figure out what Capo had been doing. But by experimenting, using trial and error and the tools the adults left lying around — all the time driven by the lure of the delicious palm nuts �
�� Elephant would eventually learn how to smash nuts for himself. It would take him three more years before he got it right. Elephant had to figure everything out from scratch himself, as if repeating in his own lifetime the whole intellectual progression of the species.

  On and on he pounded at the shells, as if he were the first ape ever to try this trick.

  Capo brought himself to a slow, shuddering orgasm, his first of the day. He withdrew from Leaf and rolled onto his back, rather unjustifiably proud of himself, and allowed her to groom him, picking knots from the fur of his belly.

  But now his peace of mind was disturbed by a sudden cacophony from deeper into the forest: hooting cries, drumming, the rustle of large bodies clambering and swinging.

  Capo sat up. In his world it wasn’t good to have too much excitement in which he wasn’t involved. He vaulted over a tree stump, drummed on a branch, routinely cuffed Elephant about the head, and loped off toward the source of the noise.

  A group of young males were hunting a monkey.

  To Capo’s eye it looked like the little vervetlike creature he had disturbed munching on acacia flowers earlier. Now it sat cowering at the top of a young palm.

  The hunters had spread out around the base of the tree, and were clambering stealthily up neighboring trees. Others, Frond and Finger among them, had gathered around to see the excitement. It was these spectators who were making all the noise; the hunters themselves moved with stealth and silence. But to the monkey the din was terrifying and disorienting.

  Capo was unpleasantly surprised when he saw who the hunters were. They were the rowdy young males who had loped off not days before on a foraging trip to another part of the forest clump. Their informal leader, a burly creature called Boulder, had given Capo some trouble in the past with his rebellious ways, and Capo had been happy to see him go: Let him blow off steam, make a few mistakes, even get hurt, and he would soon defer to Capo’s authority once more.