Evolution Read online

  The graciles, the skinny pithecines who had hunted Far, were like upright chimps. They were more upright than Capo or any ape. But their heads were like those of apes, with protruding muzzles, small brain pans, and flattened nostrils. Their posture, even when standing upright, was bent, the head thrust forward, and their arms were long, their grasping hands reaching almost to their knees. When they walked, they had to use more steps than Far would have done to cover the same ground, and they could not move so fast. But over the short distances they usually covered they were efficient and effective movers.

  They had stuck to the forest fringe. But they had learned to exploit the resources of the savannah: especially the carcasses of the great herbivores laid low by predators. When the opportunity presented itself, they would rush out of the cover of their forest to a carcass, clutching their simple flake tools, and slice through tendons and ligaments. Stolen limbs could quickly be brought back to the safety of the forest for butchery and consumption, and hammer-stones could be used to crack the remnant bones for marrow.

  All of this forced a selection for smartness. Hominids lacked the teeth of hyenas or the beaks of the carrion birds; if they were to scavenge effectively they needed better tools than Capo’s rudimentary kit. Meanwhile their bodies had gotten better at processing meat. Many pithecine types had teeth capable of shredding uncooked flesh, and a more efficient digestive system able to tolerate such rich fodder.

  Still they were marginal scavengers, at the bottom of the hierarchy of meat eaters; they had to wait their turn until the lions and hyenas and vultures had taken what they wanted from the larger kills. And scavenging, and even their rudimentary hunting, wasn’t the only pressure on the savannah apes.

  The savannah was predator hell. The leopards and bears of the forests had been bad enough. Out on the savannah there were huge flesh-shearing hyenas, and saber-tooths, and dogs the size of wolves. Small, slow, and defenseless, the hominids, walking blinking out of their forests, were an easy target for such creatures. Soon some of the predators, like the dinofelis, even learned to specialize in taking hominids.

  It was a ruthless attrition, a relentless pressure. But the hominids responded. They learned to understand the predators’ behavior, and how to seek effective refuge. They learned to cooperate better with one another, for there was safety in numbers, and they used tools to drive off their assailants. Even the development of language was driven, in part, by these pressures, as the specialized alarm cries that dated back to the forests of the notharctus slowly morphed into more flexible words.

  The savannah shaped the hominids. But they were not hunters; they were the hunted.

  The pithecines had their limitations. They needed the shelter of the forest as their base, for they were not built to withstand long periods out in the open. And they were tied to rivers, lakes, and marshes, for their bodies had little fatty tissue and so were not resilient to long periods without water.

  But as time went on, and Africa’s climate and habitat range fluctuated, the forest-fringe environment the pithecines favored spread: In a landscape of forest clumps, there was plenty of edge. The pithecine form had proved effective and enduring, and there had been a great churning of speciation events, a radiation of ape people.

  The robust gorilla folk had abandoned the adventure of the forest fringe and had taken to the deeper green. Here they had begun to exploit a source of food for which there was little competition: leaves, bark, and unripe fruit unfit for any other hominid type to digest, and nuts and seeds too hard for other animals to crack. To adapt to this lifestyle they had, like potbellies and gigantopithecines, developed huge energy-expensive guts to process their low-quality food and heavily engineered skulls capable of driving those huge jaws with their slablike teeth.

  Their social lives had changed too. In the dense forest, where there was always a supply of leaves and bark, stable groups of females came together to live off a single patch of forest. Males became solitary, each trying to maintain his hold over the females in his territory. So the males became larger than the females, and there was a premium on brute physical strength, so that each male could fight off those who would usurp him.

  The gorilla-man’s kind were among the least intelligent of the hominids of his day. That big gut was very energy expensive; to balance its budget his body, in the course of its adaptation, had had to make sacrifices elsewhere. Smarts weren’t essential among the harems in the dim, stable gloom of the deep forest, and so the gorilla folk’s big primate brains, very costly in blood and energy, had dissolved.

  But because the gorilla-man could be sure of sexual access to his females, his testicles were small. By comparison the skinny pithecine chimp-men had to mate as often as possible with as many females as they could, and needed the large, pendulous balls they displayed so readily, to produce oceans of sperm.

  Within these basic pithecine types, the gracile chimp folk and the robust gorilla types, there were many variants. Some enhanced their bipedalism. Some all but abandoned it. Some skinnies were smarter than others; some gorilla folk were dumber than the rest. There were skinnies who used tools even less advanced than Capo’s, and gorilla types who used tools more sophisticated than the gracile pithecines’ stone flakes. There were large and small, skulkers and runners, pygmies and giants, slim omnivores and pillar-toothed herbivores. There were creatures with protruding faces like a chimp’s and others with delicate, flat features almost like a human’s. And there was much crossbreeding among the types, a proliferation of subspecies and hybrids, ornamenting the carnival of hominid possibilities.

  Baffled paleontologists of the future, trying to piece this diversity together from fragmentary fossils and stone tools, would devise elaborate family trees and nomenclatures, calling their imagined species Kenyanthropus platypus; or Orrorin tugenenis; or Australopithecus garhi, africanus, afarensis, bahrelghazali, anamensis; or Ardipithecus ramidus; or Paranthropus robustus, boisei, aethiopicus; or Homo habilis. But few of the names fit the reality. And besides, the boundaries between these categories of creature were very blurred. Out in the real world, of course, such labels did not matter; there were only individuals, struggling to survive and raise their offspring, as they always had.

  Most of the diverse assemblage here would be lost in time, their poor bones swallowed up forever by the forest’s voracious green. No human would ever know how it was to live in a world like this, crowded with so many different types of people. It was a bubbling evolutionary ferment, as many variants were spun off a fundamentally successful new body plan.

  But none of this myriad of species had a future, for all these ape folk had clung to the forest. Their fingers and toes remained long and curved to help grab hold of tree trunks, and their legs were a peculiar compromise between the needs of knuckle-walking tree climber and those of biped. At night they would even make treetop nests like their forest-dwelling ancestors before them. And their brains never developed much beyond the size of Capo’s, and those of their cousins, the ancestral chimps, because their low-quality diet could sustain nothing bigger.

  For four million years the pithecines had been a wide, diverse, very successful flourishing of the hominid family. Once, in fact, the only hominids in the world had been ape-men. But their time of significant change was already over. They had been seduced by the shelter and protection of the forest, and this had robbed them of much possibility. The future lay with another group of hominids — descendants of pithecine stock themselves — but who, unlike any pithecine, had made the decisive break away from the forest.

  The future lay with Far.

  III

  Reluctantly she opened her eyes. She saw a patch of dirty ground, tilted up under her face. When she raised her head she could see brightness filtering through the dense tree trunks.

  She pushed at the ground, and got her body off the floor. Leaves and dirt stuck to her breasts and injured shoulder. She used a tree trunk to pull herself upright, and stood still until the pounding of her
heart subsided. Then she began to stagger as best she could through the forest toward the light.

  She stumbled out into the day. She raised her hand, shielding her eyes against a low, reddening sun. The land was scorched, the grass blackened, the ground cracked and dried. But beyond a low rise she saw the glint of water: a stream that rolled from eroded hills a little further away.

  She didn’t know this place. She had come right through the patch of forest, from east to west.

  She stepped forward gingerly. The scorched ground was still hot — here and there tree stumps and bushes still smoked — and the crisped grass blades hurt her feet. Soon her lower legs, already filthy from her time in the forest, were coated with a deep black soot.

  But she made it to the water. The stream was clear and fast moving. It ran over a bed of rounded volcanic cobbles, and bits of blackened vegetation skimmed over its surface. She plunged in her face and drank deeply. The dirt and dried blood washed off her skin, and the lingering stink of smoke in her nose and throat began to dissipate.

  And then she heard a call. A voice. A word. But it wasn’t a word she knew.

  She scrambled out of the water and threw herself flat behind an eroded boulder. In her world, strangers were bad news. Like their pithecine cousins her nomadic people were fiercely xenophobic.

  A man knelt on the ground, his hands nimbly exploring the scorched soil for any pickings the fire had left behind. He was young, his skin smooth, his hair thick.

  He picked up a blackened lizard, stiff and immobile. With a kind of shaped stone — its form wasn’t familiar to her — he scraped off the charred skin, exposing a morsel of pink flesh that he gulped down quickly. Now he found a snake, an adder, scorched to stiffness. Though he tried cutting through its burned skin it was too tough, and he threw the little corpse away.

  Now the man found a real treasure. It was a tortoise, cooked in its shell. He picked it up and turned it over, muttering to himself. He took his handheld tool — it was a stone flake, but it was triangular, with each face worked, and a sharp edge all around it — and jammed it into the tortoise’s neck entrance. With a little effort he cracked open the shell, and soon he was using the tool to slice up the meat. Tortoises were actually a favorite prey of pithecine hunters. They were one of the few savannah animals that were even smaller and slower than hominids, and the tortoises’ habit of burrowing into the ground did not save them from clever animals able to dig them out with sticks and who had tools able to open up shells impervious to the teeth of lions and hyenas.

  Far was fascinated by the young man’s stone ax. With its finely worked edge and shaped faces, it was far beyond her own people’s chopping stones and pithecine-like flakes. But she understood it immediately, at a deep somatic level; she had an impulse to reach out and take the stone teardrop, to try it out for herself.

  As long as she knew him, she would associate this young man with the stone tool he wielded so expertly. She would think of him as Ax.

  Suddenly Ax looked up, straight into Far’s eyes.

  She cowered back behind her boulder, but it was too late.

  He growled and dropped the tortoise — its shell clattered on the sooty ground — and held up his stone ax.

  She had nowhere to run. She stood up. She thought his gaze wandered over her body, her back and buttocks still wet from the stream. He lowered the ax and grinned at her. Then he went back to his tortoise and resumed carving it out of its shell.

  Calls came floating from the distance.

  She saw more people — folk like herself, adults and children, slim upright forms moving like shadows over the ash-strewn plain. They were exploring a miniature forest of blackened, twisted forms. It had been a birthing herd of antelopes; many of these unlucky creatures, straining over their last calves, had been unable to flee the flames. Now the people were slicing into this treasure with their marvelous stone axes, and even from here she could smell the delicious scent of cooked meat. Ax dropped the tortoise and ran off toward his people.

  After a few heartbeats, torn between caution and ravening hunger, Far began to jog after him.

  Night fell quickly, as it always did. The people gathered in a rocky hollow, which would give them some defense against the predators of the night.

  Far, with nowhere else to go, followed them.

  She couldn’t spend a night on her own; she knew that. Even now she sensed cold yellow eyes tracking her, eyes that glowed with the knowledge that she was an outlier of this group — not quite embraced within its protection — a target, like the old, the very young, the lame.

  The people didn’t drive her away. They didn’t exactly make her welcome, either. But when she tucked herself into a corner of the roomy hollow, huddled over a scrap of meat she had scavenged from one of the burnt carcasses, they tolerated her presence.

  She watched a man knapping a bit of rock. The man was old — in his late forties — and skinny, with one eye almost closed by an ugly scar. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat at his feet. Not much younger than Far, they watched what Scar-face was doing, and with big stones held clumsily in their own small hands, they tried to copy him. The girl trapped her thumb, and squealed in pain. Scar-face wordlessly took the rock from her hands, turned it around and by guiding her hands showed her how to hold the cobble more effectively. But when he saw this the boy was jealous, and he pinched the girl, making her drop the rock. “Me! Me!”

  As the darkness deepened, many of the people resorted to gentle, wordless grooming, the habit that had come with them from the ancestral forests. Mothers caressed infants, men and women alike played wordless politics as they cemented alliances and reinforced hierarchies. Sometimes the grooming turned to noisy sex.

  Far, the stranger, was excluded from all this. But as she sank toward sleep, exhausted and battered, she was aware of Ax’s eyes on her.

  When she woke, the sky beyond the hollow was already very bright.

  Everybody had gone, leaving behind a few scraps of food, patches of infant shit, damp urine marks.

  She got to her feet quickly. The bruises on her back and chest seemed to have consolidated into a single mass of pain. But her young body was already throwing off the damage it had suffered yesterday, and her head was clear. She hurried out into the light.

  The people had walked north, toward a lake. They were slim upright shadows, walking purposefully, their outlines softened by the shimmering heat haze. She ran after them.

  The lakeshore was crowded. Far made out many kinds of elephants, rhinos, horses, giraffes, buffaloes, deer, antelope, gazelles, even ostriches. In the water there were crocodiles and turtles, and birds flapped over it noisily. The giant herbivores, concentrated around the water, had devastated the landscape. From this muddy arena, their wide, well-trodden avenues snaked off in every direction. On the hardpan around the lake nothing grew but a few hardy plant species distasteful to the elephants and rhinos and able to recover quickly from trampling.

  The people moved down to the water. They picked a spot close to an elephant herd. Everybody knew that predators avoided elephants. The elephants ignored the people and continued with their own complex business. Some of them entered the water and were splashing and playing noisily; groups of cows rumbled mysteriously, and males trumpeted and clashed their huge tusks. These massive animals, the architects of the landscape, were slabs of muscle and power, with their own stately, flat-footed grace.

  Most of the women were working the water’s edge. Far saw that one of them had turned up the nest of a freshwater turtle; its long eggs were quickly cracked, their contents devoured. Other women were harvesting the mussels that grew abundantly in the shallow waters, especially freshwater clams.

  Far saw that Ax, like most of the men, had waded into the water. He was carrying a wooden spear, and he stood very still, eyes fixed on the glimmering water’s surface. After a few heartbeats he stabbed down with a powerful splash — and when he brought up the spear, a fish had been neatly skewered, its silver body
wriggling. Ax hooted, pulled the fish off his spear, and threw it to the shore. Another man, a little further out, was creeping up on a water fowl that paddled complacently across the surface. The man leapt, but the bird got away, amid much comical splashing, squawking, and shouting.

  Far joined the women.

  She quickly found a horseshoe crab, crawling stiffly along a muddy channel. It was easy to catch. She held it upside down, and it waved its clawed legs feebly. She used a bit of stone to open up its head shield, which was the size of a dinner plate. Inside, near the front, there was a mass of eggs, like fat rice grains. She scooped them out with her fingers and gulped them down. The flavor was very strong, like oily fish. The rest of the crab’s meat proved too tough to be worth digging out. She flipped away the smashed head shield, and moved on in search of more food.

  Thus the day wore on, as the people foraged for their food, just another type of animal on this crowded savannah.

  As midday approached, the hominids moved away from the water, relaxed, satiated.

  But Ax struck out on his own. Far trailed after him. He gazed back at her. She knew he was aware she was following him.

  Ax came to a dried-up streambed laced with worn cobbles. He walked up and down the bed, examining the rocks, until he found what he wanted. It was a cobble about the size of his fist, flattened and rounded. He sat squat in the streambed and rummaged around until he found a suitable hammer-stone. He had brought some dried brush that he spread over his crossed legs for protection. Then he went to work, tapping at the core he had selected. Soon flakes flew away, briskly rattling off the cobble.