Orphan of Creation (27 page)

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Pete Ardley wriggled down deeper into his chair and grinned. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Grossington was doing his best to hide exactly the stuff Pete had left out of the first article, no doubt for the same reason: If he released the text of the old newspaper ad, the clues in it would have everyone and his cousin chasing the story in Gabon. Since Pete had already paid a visit to the Gabonese Embassy, the precaution wasn’t going to do Grossington much good. He checked his watch. His follow-up story should be hitting the wire in about an hour if Teems kept on schedule.

A reporter in the first row stood up. “Dr. Grossington, Cindy Hogan, Los Angeles
Times
. This skull here, this hundred-odd year old skull, if I understand this, you’re saying that it’s an ancestor of mankind. How could that possibly be?”

DR. GROSSINGTON: Very simple: It
couldn’t
possibly be. (Laughter.) Things are more complicated than that, and maybe I should go back a step or two.
Australopithecus boisei
was last seen about ten thousand centuries ago, at which point it vanished without a trace. Now he pops up again. What this amounts to is a million-year gap in the fossil record. Any paleontologist will tell you that is not at all uncommon. Look up the coelacanth when you get back to the office. That’s C-O-E-L-A-C-A-N-T-H. But what makes this case so unusual is that the gap happens to end so recently, and that it involves a species closely related to our own. But there is no great mystery about the gap.

“The odds against a given creature dying in such a way that it leaves a fossil, and then the odds against that fossil later being found, are astronomical. If there was only a small population of these creatures, and if they happened to live in a climate where it was unlikely for their remains to fossilize, then all that is required to explain the gap is that we simply haven’t found any of the very small number of fossils left by that small population.

“However, there is another point I need to clear up.
Australopithecus boisei
is not considered an ancestral species to mankind, and has not been for decades. The human and australopithecine line do share a comparatively recent common ancestor. As was noted in the first news story, Ambrose is our cousin, not our grandparent. The chimp and gorilla are also living species with which we share a fairly recent ancestor species. Ambrose here stands in a similar, though closer, relationship to us. Having said that, I must fog the issue a bit more by pointing out that there is no particular reason ancestor and descendant can’t coexist—it probably happens all the time. A parent species splits off a descendant species, which comes to occupy a slightly different niche in the environment, leaving the parent species and its unchanged niche undisturbed. In such circumstances, both species, parent and child, can live side-by-side indefinitely. However, that isn’t the present case.

“Yes, you in the back.”

QUESTION: Dr. Grossington, given Darwin’s theory of evolution, how can you account for this, ah,
Australpithcoos boyse
surviving unchanged for a million years? Aren’t all species supposed to be slowly evolving all the time?

DR. GROSSINGTON: I’d suggest you work on your pronunciation, young man. (Laughter.) You’ve hit another misconception square on the head. There is a growing body of evidence that
most
species remain largely unchanged over long periods of time, so long as environments remain stable. They have no reason to change. But when, for whatever reason, the environment shifts, there is a greater chance for a mutation to be better adapted to the change. Many scientists—including myself—now believe that most evolution occurs in short bursts during these periods of environmental upheaval. For the record, the idea is called punctuated equilibrium. There is a series of interesting correlations between the dates of major shifts in the environment and the key speciations that eventually resulted in human beings.

QUESTION: Do you mean to say that these creatures are exactly like animals that lived a million years ago?

DR. GROSSINGTON: No, no more than you are exactly like the other people in this room. Human beings are widely variable, as we all know, coming in all shapes, sizes, and colors—but we are all one species. There are some differences between Ambrose and the remains we’ve seen from a million years ago, but they are fairly minor ones, not enough to warrant the naming of a new species. In fact, I would go so far as to say this discovery will improve the standing of
Australopithecus boisei
as an independent species. The most notable change is that the creatures we found would appear to be a bit larger than the million-year-old
boisei
remains we have seen heretofore. Ambrose probably stood about 172 centimeters tall—say, five foot seven or eight—several inches taller than his ancestors. He is also somewhat more lightly built, as best we can tell.

QUESTION: I understand the meaning of most of the other species names in hominid evolution, but what does
boisei
mean?

DR. GROSSINGTON: It means that the species was discovered and named by Louis Leakey, who received research money from a gentleman named Charles Boise. (Laughter). Yes, in the third row.

QUESTION: Dr. Grossington, if these animals did not evolve into humans, why is this discovery so important?

DR. GROSSINGTON: When most people sit down to ask what it is about human beings that makes us different, what it is that lets us build buildings and write books and create a civilization, they come up with a very short list of things that distinguish us from other species. Our hands, our upright posture—and our brain. The average size human brain is about 1,500 cubic centimeters, though it ranges between 1,000 and 1,800 cc’s—with no correlation between brain size and intelligence of a healthy individual, I might add. Now the average chimp brain is about 380 cc’s, and the earliest generally accepted fossil member of our own genus
Homo
, a skull called KNM-ER-1470 had a 775 cc brain. Ambrose here had a 560 cubic centimeter brain. There are other issues of brain function, of course—his brain was different from ours, not just smaller—but in a very real way, Ambrose was teetering just on the
edge
of the human range, a range his kind never crossed in the millions of years since his line divided from ours. They did just fine with a smaller brain. It’s fascinating to wonder what life was like in that sort of twilight world, in between animal and human. We may be able to learn a lot about ourselves by looking at someone so similar, and yet so different.

QUESTION: I don’t know any better way to ask this, but what were the australopithecines
like
? How smart were they? Could they use tools? Could they talk? Did they walk on two feet or four?

DR. GROSSINGTON: Taking those in order—we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, and on two feet, just as well as you can. Chimps are smart enough to use tools, which suggests that the australopithecines were capable of it—but we can’t prove it. There is some evidence that the structures in our mouth and throat that make speech possible did not develop until very late in the game, so my guess would be that they could not talk in the way we do. Certainly they must have made cries and calls of one sort or another—every animal does.

QUESTION: If they
could
speak, Doctor, and there was one here to ask, what would be the first question you’d put to an australopithecine?

DR. GROSSINGTON: I’d ask the same question my entire science has been asking since it was founded: What is a human being? That is the central question of anthropology, and in a way, the central question of all religion and philosophy as well. What is it that makes us what we are? What is it that makes a man? Over and over again, we have asked that question—but always of ourselves. We have given ourselves some fascinating answers, but I’d be most interested to know what someone else thinks. What perspective would another kind of mind have? Yes, over there in the brown dress.

QUESTION: Dr. Grossington, couldn’t a case be made that this discovery actually puts the lie to the whole theory of evolution? Wouldn’t Creation Science better explain the appearance of a species in what evolution theory says is the wrong place at the wrong time?

DR. GROSSINGTON: I see a Creationist got in. Normally, madam, I am polite about such things, tolerant of your point of view—inaccurate, misleading, self-serving, self-contradictory, and anti-thought though it might be. But not here, not today. This is
my
house, and my work, my career, and you are here at my invitation, and I will not stand here and let you call my whole life’s effort a lie. What we have found in no way contradicts a single particle of the
fact
of evolution. That life does evolve, no scientist with a shred of integrity or objectivity could deny. How it works, what the processes are that cause that evolution—
that
is what is still under legitimate debate. I might add that this discovery doesn’t affect that debate either. It neither proves nor disproves anything, but is simply a dramatic event that nonetheless fits quite comfortably inside evolution as we understand it. So go peddle it somewhere else.

“You know, there’s a joke, or maybe it should be called a parable, I’ve heard about you people, concerning a little boy who doesn’t know how babies are made. He asks around, and none of his friends knew either, and so they conclude that babies
aren’t
made, since none of them knows how it happens. They confuse the question of how the thing happened with the question of whether it happened at all, and decide that not understanding the process proves the process doesn’t exist, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Later on, our little boy finds out a few details about what Mom and Dad did together to make a baby. He’s so upset by the thought of his parents doing any such thing he rejects not only that answer, but the whole question of his own origin, and decides that story about the stork makes sense after all. Moral: You can’t know the truth if you aren’t willing to believe it. But we try not to think that way here. So kindly tell your readers that the stork did not bring them. Next question. Over on the left side there.

QUESTION: I’m going to have to remember that analogy. Dr. Grossington, I have a question, and perhaps a follow-up. I have noticed that you have referred to this fossil species in the present tense more than once. Is there a reason for that? If there were a skull in 1851, might there not be a living animal somewhere in the world today? Are you researching that point?

DR. GROSSINGTON: Ah, yes. Well, that’s an excellent question. As I am sure you know, many species have become extinct between 1851 and today. There is no guarantee that
Australopithecus boisei
survives today. But it is a point we are looking into. Next question.

QUESTION: Yes, Doctor, I had a follow-up. Where, exactly,
are
Dr. Marchando, Dr. Maxwell, and Mr. Jones?

DR. GROSSINGTON: I can’t answer that question, for the very good reason that I don’t know, exactly. At the moment, there is no way to reach them. I can say that they are in seclusion of their own choice, so they might work further on this whole issue. But, I must admit that even if I did know where they were, I wouldn’t tell you. They are at a delicate stage of their work, and I think it would be not only unfair but counterproductive to disturb them now.

QUESTION: Doctor, I’ll let someone else get a chance in a moment, but one last thing: There seem to be a number of areas you aren’t willing to go into—how these creatures got to where they were found, how you came to excavate them, what the rest of your team is doing. Considering the importance of this find, and the right of the public and the scientific community to know, shouldn’t you be a bit more forthcoming?

DR. GROSSINGTON: Young man, I have been bludgeoned over the head for the past two days with the public’s right to be told things I don’t even know myself yet. I will not be forced into making statements that could seriously damage the course of our researches.

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Pete just sat back and let his recorder take it all in. He glanced at his watch again. His story was safely out by now. He hadn’t asked a question yet, but his flair for the dramatic was getting the better of him. Maybe it was time to drop his little bombshell. He stood up and called out, “Dr. Grossington, Pete Ardley, Gowrie
Gazette
.” All eyes and cameras instantly turned on him. Already, either his name or his paper’s name was already well known. “Regarding the whereabouts of your partners, could you at least confirm the information I have obtained, that they received visas to enter the African nation of Gabon, and are currently in the interior of that country, searching for the home of the australopithecines?”

Grossington opened his mouth and shut it. Abruptly he stood up, placed Ambrose back in his box, and announced, “This press conference is concluded.” He stood up and walked off the stage, but already Pete was surrounded by other reporters, demanding to know more. Maybe the press conference was over, Pete thought, but the fun was just beginning.

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Barbara sat and watched the creature. Nothing else was important—nothing else existed for her but this not-quite-human. Her new friend sat across from Barbara, just as fascinated with her, the creature’s expressive brown eyes locked on her.