Evolution (45 page)

That was when he glimpsed the strangers.

He crouched down behind a bluff, holding his breath.

They were hunters; he could see that immediately. They were following an old elephant track. Elephants walked to water, and where there was water, there would be many animals, including the medium-sized creatures like deer that people hunted by preference.

There were four of them, three men and a woman, all adults. As they walked the hunters’ legs swung powerfully, with their torsos tipped a little forward. It was a gait built for strength, not elegance or speed: the hunters had none of the fleetness of Far. Thick beards hid the men’s dark faces, and the woman had tied her long hair back with a bit of leather. Unlike Pebble this group wore clothes: just bits of hide, unsewn and tied around the body with strips of leather or plaited bark. Pebble could see the bite marks in the clothes. Leather was treated by chewing and stretching it with the teeth, and a major function of that big ridge of bone on Pebble’s brow was to provide an anchor for the jaws that must do such mighty work.

And they carried weapons: narrow wooden throwing spears, and shorter, stubby thrusting spears, great logs of hardwood with slabs of stone stuck to the end with blobs of resin and leather ties. They were giants’ weapons that a human would have had trouble lifting, let alone wielding in anger.

They were robust folk, people like Pebble’s kind. But Pebble could see ocher markings scrawled on the skin of their faces, hands, and arms. Where Pebble’s own adornment was made up of vertical lines— bars and stripes and bands, all pointing to the sky— these people wore a kind of clumsy crosshatch, sketched by thick fingers.

They were strangers. You could tell that by the markings. And strangers meant trouble. That was a law that worked as invariably as the rising of the sun, the waxing of the Moon.

Pebble waited until the newcomers had passed out of sight behind a stand of sparse acacia. Then, as silently as his slablike body would allow him, he began to run for home. The yam tubers he had dug up lay abandoned on the ground behind him— with his digging stick.

Pebble’s home was a kind of village, with four large huts set roughly around a clearing. And yet it was not a village, for his people lived not quite as any humans ever would.

Pebble stood, panting, in the central clearing. Nobody was around. Close to the door of one hut a fire smoldered. The trampled ground was scattered with bone, vegetable debris, tools, mattresses of leaves and grass, trays of bark, pegs, wedges, a broken spear, discarded bits of leather. The place was a mess.

The huts were crude and ugly, but serviceable. They had been built of thick saplings set in rough circles in holes in the ground. The gaps between the saplings were filled with rattan cane split into switches, and overlapping leaves, bunches of rushes, bark. The saplings were bent over together and their ends pushed over and under each other. It was a kind of weaving that Capo would have recognized, for five million years earlier he had made his treetop nests in much the same way: Every innovation of necessity was built on what had gone before.

The huts were old. The people had lived here for generations. The dirt beneath Pebble’s feet was thick with the bones of his ancestors. The people felt safe here. This was their place, their land.

But now, Pebble knew, all that might change.

He raised his head to the washed-out sky. ”
U-lu-lu-lu-lu! U-lu-lu-lu-lu!
 . . .” It was a cry of danger, of pain, the first cry any child learned after the feed-me yell.

Soon the people came running, from the huts, from the land beyond where they foraged and hunted. They gathered around Pebble in concern. There were twelve of them: three men, four women, three older children— including Pebble himself— and two infants in their mothers’ frightened grasp.

He tried to tell them what he had seen. He pointed back to where he had seen the strangers, and ran a few paces back and forth. “Others! Others, others, hunters!” He began an elaborate performance, gesticulating, posturing, puffing himself up to walk like powerful hunters, even miming to show how they would smash in the people’s heads with their mighty fists.

His audience were impatient. They turned away, as if eager to return to their foraging, or eating, or sleeping. But one man watched Pebble’s performance more carefully. He was a squat man even more powerfully built than most, and his face was distorted by a childhood accident that had smashed the cartilage in his great fleshy nose. This man, Flatnose, was Pebble’s father.

Pebble’s language was sparse. It was just a string of concrete words with no grammar, no syntax. And, a million years after Far, talking was still basically a social skill, in fact used mainly for gossip. To convey detail or complex information, you had to repeat, use endless circumlocution— and mime, gesture, perform. Besides, Pebble had to convince his audience. It was hard for the adults to accept what Pebble had to say. They couldn’t see the strangers for themselves. He might be lying or exaggerating: He was, after all, little more than a child. The only way they had to gauge his sincerity was by the passion and energy he put into his performance.

It was always this way. To get anyone to listen, you had to shout.

At last Pebble gave up, panting, and sat squat in the dirt. He had done his best.

Flatnose kneeled beside him. Flatnose believed his son: His performance had cost him too much to be lies. He rested his hand on his son’s head.

Reassured, Pebble touched his father’s arm. There he found a series of scars, long and straight, following the line of the forearm. These scratches were the marks of no animal. Flatnose had inflicted them on himself, with the sharp blade of a stone knife. When he was older, Pebble knew he would join in the same game, the same silent, grinning self-mutilation: It was part of what his father was, part of his strength, and Pebble found it reassuring now to stroke those scars.

One by one the other adults joined them.

Then, the moment of silent acceptance over, Flatnose got to his feet. There were no words now. Everybody knew what had to be done. The adults and the older children— Pebble and a girl a little younger than himself— started to move around the settlement, gathering weapons. There was no particular order to the settlement, and weapons and other tools lay where they had last been used, amid piles of food, debris, ash.

Despite the urgency the people moved sluggishly, as if even now reluctant to accept the truth.

Dust, Pebble’s mother, tried to soothe her squalling baby as she gathered up her gear. Her loose, prematurely grayed hair was, as always, full of dry, aromatic dust, an eccentric affectation. At twenty-five she was aging quickly, and she limped when she walked, the effect of an old hunting wound that had never healed right. Since then Dust had had to work twice as hard, and the cumulative effect showed in her stooped posture and careworn face. But her mind was clear and unusually imaginative. She was already thinking of the difficult times ahead. Watching her face, Pebble felt guilty at having brought this trouble down on her.

There was a soft sigh, a flash. Pebble turned.

In a dreamlike moment, he actually saw the wooden spear in flight. It was hewn from a fine piece of hardwood, thickest near the point and tapered back toward the other end, shaped to make it fly true.

Then it was as if time began to flow again.

The spear slammed into Flatnose’s back. He was thrown to the ground, the spear sticking straight out of his back. He shuddered once, and a burst of shit cascaded from his bowels, and a black-red pool spread under him, soaking into the dirt.

For a heartbeat Pebble couldn’t take this in— the thought that Flatnose had gone so suddenly— it was as if a mountain had suddenly vanished, a lake evaporated. But Pebble had seen plenty of death in his young life. And already he could smell the stink of shit and blood: meat smells, not person smells.

A stranger was standing between the huts, squat and powerful. He was wrapped in skins, and he held a thrusting spear. His face was daubed with crosshatched ocher marks. He was the one who had hurled the spear at Flatnose. And Pebble saw his own abandoned digging stick in the stranger’s hand. They had seen him at the yam stand. They had tracked his footsteps.
Pebble had led them here.

Full of rage, fear, and guilt, he hurled himself forward.

But he went clattering to the ground. His mother had grabbed his waist. Lame or not she was still stronger than he was, and she glared at him, jabbering, “Stupid, stupid!” For an instant sanity returned to Pebble. Naked, unarmed, he would have been killed in an instant.

A man burst out of the heart of the settlement. He was naked and he carried his own thrusting spear. He was Pebble’s uncle, and he hurled himself at the killer of his brother. The stranger fended off the first blow, but his assailant closed in. The two of them fell to the dirt, wrestling, each trying to get in a decisive blow or thrust. Soon they had disappeared in a cloud of blood-spattered dust. They were two immensely muscled beings using all their mighty strength against each other. It was like a fight between two bears.

But more of the hunters came boiling out of the cover of the rock bluffs and trees. Men and women together, all armed with spears and axes; they were dirt-crusted, lean, hard-eyed. They had come hunting Pebble and his group, as if they were a herd of unwary antelope.

Pebble could see desperation in the eyes of the others. These newcomers were not nomads, not invaders by instinct, any more than Pebble’s people would have been. Only a dire catastrophe of their own could have forced them to this plight, to make them come into a new and strange land, to wage this sudden war. But now that they were here, they would fight to the death, for they had no choice.

There was a howl. The hunter who had taken on his uncle was standing now. One arm dangled, bloody and broken. But he was grinning, his mouth a mass of blood and broken teeth. Pebble’s uncle lay at his feet, his chest split open.

Already Pebble’s folk had lost two of their three adult men, Flatnose and his brother. They had no chance of resisting.

The survivors ran. There was no time to grab anything, no tools or food— not even the children. And the hunters fell on them as they fled, using the butts of their spears to fell and disable. The third man was cut down. The hunters caught two of the women, and the girl younger than Pebble. The women were thrown to the ground, face first, and the young men pulled their legs apart, jostling for the right to be first.

The others ran, on and on, until the pursuers gave up.

Pebble looked back the way they had come. The hunters were pawing through the settlement, the ground that had been Pebble’s ancestors’ for time out of memory.

There were five of them left from the village, Pebble realized. Two women, including his mother, Pebble himself and a smaller girl, and one of the infants— not Pebble’s sister. Just five.

Her face hard, Dust turned to Pebble. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Man,” she said gravely. “You.”

It was true, he saw with horror. He was the oldest male left: of the five, only the squalling infant in the dirt at his feet was male.

Dust scooped up the motherless infant and held him close. Then she turned resolutely away from her settlement and began to stomp away to the north, her lame gait leaving uneven tracks in the dirt. She didn’t look back, not once.

Bewildered, terrified, Pebble followed.

The Pleistocene, this era of ice, was an age of brutal climatic turbulence. Droughts and floods and storms were commonplace: in this age a “once-in-a-century” climatic disaster came around every decade. It was a time of intense variations, a noisy time.

This created an environment that was intensely challenging for all the animals who inhabited it. To cope with the changes many creatures got smarter— not just hominids, but carnivores, ungulates, and others. The average mammalian brain size would double across the two million years of the Pleistocene.

The great family of hominid species to which Pebble belonged had been born in Africa, as had so many others, far to the south of here. Smarter, stronger than Far’s folk, they had pushed in a great arc out of Africa into Europe, south of the ice, and into Asia, as far as India. They had adapted their technology, their ways, and, over enough time, even their bodies to the disparate conditions they encountered.

And they had displaced the older forms of people. Elegant, skinny walkers like Far still survived in eastern Asia, but they clung on in Africa only in pockets. In Europe they were extinct altogether. As for the pithecine types, the last of them had succumbed long ago, squeezed out between the chimps and the new savannah folk. Still, the hominid range was narrow. There were still no people in the cold northern lands, none in Australia, and none in the Americas, none at all. But the Old World felt ever more full of them.

Meanwhile the land was growing poorer.

Once more there had been extinctions. And this time the people had had a lot to do with it. Under climate pressure, many of the larger, slow-breeding species of animals had found themselves increasingly tied to the water sources. They therefore became an easier target for increasingly clever hominid hunters, who, looking for the lowest-risk kills, selectively picked off the old, the weak— and, crucially, the very young.

The largest and least versatile species had been taken out first. In Africa, of the wide and ancient elephantid family, only the true elephants remained. Many varieties of giraffe, pig, and hippo had followed.

And then there was fire.

The harnessing of fire, not so many generations before Pebble’s time, had been one of the most significant events in hominid evolution. Fire offered many advantages: warmth, light, protection from carnivores. It could be used to harden wood, and its heat could be used to make many plant and animal foods digestible. There was still no organized large-scale firing and ground clearing; that would come later. But already the daily use of fire had had, little by little, a profound impact on the vegetation, as those plants able to withstand fire were favored at the expense of less hardy cousins. And meanwhile, though true agriculture lay far in the future, hominids had begun to select those plant species they favored for their own purposes— just as Pebble had cleared grass from the yam stand.