CRO-MAGNON (25 page)

In what seemed like seconds later, she glanced up in surprise when Calder announced it was time to leave. Packing her samples in ice, she struggled to her feet under the weight of her tank, plodded forward, and gazed at the panel of newly uncovered paintings.

“
Wow.”

“
Yes,” Calder said, pointing to the first of the four. “History’s first pornographic picture.”

The Cro-Magnon woman was kneeling, her body limned by the cherry light of banked coals. Her trousers had been pulled down and her leather tunic shoved up. The Neanderthal with the missing tooth from the previous quartet of paintings, his breechclout lowered to reveal the hairy root of an extraordinarily thick penis, socketed his crotch against her bare buttocks. His muscular arms encircled her waist, hands cupping ample breasts, the sides of his thumbs brushing nipples the artist had rendered in petal pink.

Blaine pointed at the young woman’s down-turned mouth. “She doesn’t look happy.”

The second painting showed the woman kneeling over a carpet of moss beneath the new leaves of a small willow. She cradled a wolf pup with a yellowish ruff and protruding ribs.

The third picture contained so much action that Blaine had to inspect each area before putting it together. “Amazing.”

“
That’s the word.”

The woman, now with bulging belly, had one arm restraining a partly grown wolf. She and the crone were watching the Neanderthal with the broken nose shove the gap-toothed man away from a young Neanderthal girl who cowered in the background, her disarranged furs revealing budding breasts.

“
Why do I get the feeling this is not a nice man?” Blaine muttered.

“
Welcome to the human race,” Calder said. “Then as now.”

The lower right image showed the Cro-Magnon woman holding a baby while the man with the lined face stood stiff-legged, pointing at her. The crone from the previous panel stood to one side, her hand extended.

Blaine sucked in her breath. “Look at the baby.”

“
What about him?”

“
Prominent chin but heavy cheekbones. Vertical forehead but shelf-like brow ridge.”

“
Quite so,” Calder said. “He grew into the hybrid boy here in the cave.”

“
I agree.” Blaine scanned the panel of paintings again, then the previous two panels that told of the young woman’s flight from the Cro-Magnon camp and “rescue” by the Neanderthal hunting party. “So, what is the story here?”

“
I thought you did well with the last panel. Give your subconscious time to work.”

“
Right.” She glanced at her watch, where the minute hand nudged the marker on the bevel ring. “You’re right about the time. We’d better start back.”

“
By the way,” Calder said. “My inspection shows that the woman was right-handed.”

“
How about the boy?”

“
You tell me.”

“
What d’you mean?”

“
I mean I flat can’t tell his handedness. Not from calluses, relative muscularity, or even the scratches from clamping meat in his teeth and slicing it.”

“
What does that signify?”

“
I’ve never seen the like.”

“
No one is truly ambidextrous,” Blaine said. “That’s a myth.”

“
You’re the geneticist. Take a look at his genes.”

“
I intend to.”

#

“
There’s Teague,” Blaine said. “He’s motioning us to hurry.

Calder looked up from fiddling with his headlamp, which had been cycling on and off during the tricky swim out of the tunnel. Dense clouds had begun to roll down from the upper valley, and a brisk wind rocked the johnboat. He spotted Teague’s blocky figure across the choppy gray water, one arm beckoning. He felt the skiff’s stern settle as Zinchenko opened the throttle.

“
Probably Salomon is on the radio,” he said.

“
I don’t like this micromanagement.”

“
The man’s hard-nosed, all right.” Calder shrugged. “It doesn’t really hurt us, though.”

“
I don’t like where it’s leading. We’re onto the archaeological find of the millennium, and Salomon is only interested in retrieving the Neanderthal’s DNA so he can make more money.”

“
We can still pursue the anthropological aspects privately. The prehistoric people, their lifestyle, their genes.”

“
Not if he shuts down the expedition. Legally, we couldn’t even tell anyone other than Mathiessen. And he’s in the same boat.”

Calder glanced at her. “How so?”

“
We signed a secrecy agreement, remember?”

“
That was only to ensure that no one would interfere with the mission. After searching the country on the q.t. for the right two people, making a probably illicit deal with Delyanov, and sending us on a secret expedition under false pretenses, certainly Salomon wouldn’t expose his double dealing to pursue a legal technicality—”

“
He would if he thought it was in his interest.”

Calder glanced at Teague, waiting by the floating aluminum dock. The fact of the industrialist saddling them with a threatening observer seemed to substantiate Caitlin’s concerns.

“
I don’t like Teague being here,” she said, echoing his concern. “Like I said, I’ve heard stories . . .”

“
I think we ought to have Mathiessen visit. I believe he’s already in Europe for an international paleo meeting. We could inform him of everything we’ve found, give him copies of the photos and samples of tissue.”

She glanced at him. “As insurance, you mean.”

“
Yes. With Rolf in the loop it would be hard for Salomon to suppress the results for long.”

“
I meant, insurance for our lives.”

Calder looked at Teague, only a few yards away now, watching them with his dead eyes. “You really think Salomon would . . .”

“
I don’t know. But I don’t see him agreeing to bring Mathiessen here.”

“
We could pressure him.”

“
Pressure Laszlo Salomon?” Her blue eyes flashed. “How?”

“
Tell him Fitrat suspects something, that she’s getting antsy, and that a visit by Mathiessen would tend to convince her everything’s all right.”

She shrugged. “Worth a try.”

The boat bumped the aluminum dock, and Teague said, “Mr. Salomon wants a report.”

They trooped into Zinchenko’s trailer. He muttered something, and Salomon’s voice came over the radio, weak but intelligible:

“
What have you learned?”

“
Not much since yesterday,” Calder said “We—”

He paused while the speaker hissed and popped. He was taking the lead again because Fitrat was present; he knew she suspected something, and he wanted to control the conversation as much as possible.

At least she wasn’t puffing on a cigarillo, he thought. Last time they’d dived, the dry compressed air had brought out a rawness in his throat that he swore came from breathing the woman’s secondhand smoke.

“
I’m at the Geneva plant,” Salomon said. “I’ll be flying out there tomorrow to assess progress. I want samples from all three specimens, including both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.”

Calder glanced at Fitrat by the door, to see if the director of antiquities knew it would be necessary to extract samples from the bodies in order to fill Salomon’s request. When she said nothing, he assumed that either she didn’t understand or Delyanov had ordered her to ignore small breaches.

Probably the latter, he thought, noting the sour expression on her closed face.

He turned back to the mike. “Sir, we’d like Dr. Mathiessen to accompany you.”

After a short pause Salomon said, “Why?”

“
The tunnel is threatening to pinch shut. We want to consult Rolf on what we’ve found and get his advice on what to concentrate on in the short time we may have.”

“
You already know what you are to ‘concentrate on,’ Dr. Calder.” There was no mistaking the menace in the industrialist’s silky tone. “You and Dr. Blaine both.”

“
There’s a problem with perception on this end.” Calder was careful to keep from glancing at Fitrat, whom he’d seen extracting one of her dreaded cigarillos. “Dr. Mathiessen’s presence would tend to normalize the situation.”

“
I see.” A pause while Salomon translated the meaning and assessed its implication. “There isn’t time to bring him from the States—”

Calder said, “He should be in Brussels at the quarterly meeting of the European Paleoanthropology Association.”

“
I don’t know . . .”

Blaine leaned over the mike and spoke firmly. “We need Mathiessen here, Mr. Salomon.”

A longer pause. “That sounds like a demand.”

“
Call it what you will. You sent us out here to dive under a mountain that you knew is unstable. All we’re asking is that we be allowed to consult with someone you’ve already enlisted.”

“
I’ll inquire if Dr. Mathiessen is free.” His voice turned even silkier. “But don’t ever threaten me, Dr. Blaine.”

“
We were just—”

“
I have resources. Don’t make me use them.”

Calder said, “What does that mean, sir? If it means—”

“
See that the samples are ready. Out.”

In the staticky silence Calder glanced at Teague, standing by the door beside Fitrat. The hatchet man stared back, his dead eyes the same cinereous shade as the water in the lake.

#

The whine of the generator pervaded the work trailer. Blaine’s portable gene-sequencing hardware and its peripherals occupied most of the makeshift table. She felt surprised that Ian had interrupted his anthropological examination of the bodies in order to investigate their handedness for her. Apparently he wasn’t the total curmudgeon she’d thought.

And his Multiregional Evolution theory didn’t seem quite so farfetched as before. But of course, compared with Out-of-Africa, its effect would be minor. She gave a final tweak to a portable electrophoresis plate, which she was using to check the sequencer results, and energized the unit.

“
Now that you’ve poked and prodded the bodies, assessed the artifacts, and examined three panels of paintings, what’s your verdict?”

“
It’s a mixed bag.” Calder glanced up from the screen of his laptop, where a splash of color was softened by Blaine’s angle of vision. “Overall, the paintings verify that Cro-Magnons lived in larger groups and had a more advanced society than Neanderthals. Perhaps because they originally came from Africa, which had a large population and relatively benign conditions.”

“
We pretty well knew that.”

“
Yes, but the mixed Aurignacian-Mousterian look of the implements in the cave tends to verify that Chatelperronian tool kits represented a melding of two cultures, which implies contact between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals.” He glanced at his laptop. “And numerous regression analyses show the boy’s measurements as hybrid, so we know there was interbreeding.”

“
That could be limited to this one case. Or at least isolated instances. And we don’t know if the boy would have been fertile.”

“
Based on physical characteristics, I think maybe we do.”

“
Horses and donkeys breed, but mules and hinnies are almost always sterile.”

“
The discovery of the Lagar-Velho boy, with his mixed character, implies that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons interbred over a considerable time.” Calder’s voice enthused. “Erik Trinkaus feels it shows that the two peoples could and did share mates when they came in contact.”

She considered. “Of course, with horses and donkeys, different numbers of chromosomes are involved.” She glanced at a printout. “Which I can already see is not the case with Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.”

“
There you go.” Calder paused to input a datum to the laptop. “All this supports the multiregionalist view that each new population was gradually absorbed by the next, worldwide.”

Bone lovers,
Blaine thought
.
He did have a point, but it contradicted genetic evidence that she had more confidence in.

She said, “And yet, what little Neanderthal DNA we’ve previously been able to recover is several times as far removed from the modern human average as contemporary geographical groups are from each other.”

“
I’ve heard other geneticists claim that those data are flawed and that Neanderthal and modern human distributions do overlap.”

“
I assume you’re referring to phylogenetic analyses not allowing for the high substitution rate among sites in the D-loop region. That anomaly has been corrected, and while—”

“
I wasn’t really.” Calder shrugged. “I do know that Andrew Kramer’s comparison of fossil skulls from Europe and Australia suggests mixing of local populations with migrating moderns.”

“
Morphological comparisons are subjective. They could mean anything.”

“
Have you looked around the street lately in Europe or America?”

She sniffed. “What’s that mean?”

“
Neanderthal features occur frequently: big bones, sloping foreheads, heavy brow ridges. And there are features you can only see in X-rays, such as the shape of the nerve hole in the jawbone, and the pattern of a suture in the zygomatic arch.”