Evolution

In the noon heat the grass eaters clustered in the shade, or simply lay in the dust. She glimpsed great static herds of elephant types, many species of them, like gray clouds in the distance. Clumsy, high-stepping ostriches pecked listlessly at the ground. Sleek predators slept lazily with their cubs. Even the scavengers, the wheeling birds and the scuttling feeders, were resting from their grisly chores. Nothing stirred but the dust that she kicked up, nothing moved but her own fleeting shadow, shrunk to a patch of darkness beneath her.

Fully immersed in her body, her world, she ran without calculation or analysis, ran with a fluency and freedom no primate kind had known before.

She was not thinking as a human would. She was conscious of nothing but her breath, the pleasurable ache in her muscles, her belly, the land that seemed to fly beneath her feet. But, running naked, she looked human.

She was tall — more than a hundred and fifty centimeters. Her kind were taller than any earlier people. She was lithe, lanky, and didn’t weigh more than forty-five kilograms; her limbs were lean, her muscles hard, her belly and back flat. She was just nine years old. But she was at the cusp of adulthood, her hips broadening and her breasts small, firm, already rounded. And she was not done with growing yet. Though she would keep her slim body proportions, she could expect to grow to around two meters. Her sweat-flecked skin was bare, save for a curly black thatch on her head, and dark scraps at her crotch and armpits. In fact, she had as many body hairs as any other ape, but they were pale and tiny. Her face was round, small, and she had a fleshy, rounded nose, protruding like a human’s, not lying flat like an ape’s.

Perhaps her chest was a little high, a little conical; perhaps in the proportion of her long limbs she might have looked unusual. But her body was within the boundaries of human variation; she might have looked like a denizen of a desert country, like the Dinka of the Sudan, or the Turkana, or the Masai, who would one day walk the land she now crossed.

She looked human. Her head was different, though. Above her eyes ran a broad ridge of bone, which led back to a long, back-sloping forehead. From there, the bone ran with almost no rise to the back of her skull. The shape of her head was masked by her thick mass of hair, but it would have been impossible to mistake its flatness, the smallness of her cranium.

She had the body of a human, the skull of an ape. But her eyes were clear, sharp, curious. Nine years old, suffused with the joy of her body in this brief moment of life and light and freedom, she was as happy as it was possible for her to be. To human eyes, she would have been beautiful.

Her people were hominids — closer to humans than chimps or gorillas — and were related to the species one day tentatively labeled Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. But all across the Old World there were many, many variants, many subspecies based on the same overall body plan. They were a successful and diverse kind, and there would never be enough bones and bits of skull to tell their whole story.

Something darted out at her feet. She pulled up, startled, panting. It was a cane rat, a rodent; disturbed from its slow foraging it scuttled away, indignant.

And she heard a cry. "Far! Far!"

She looked back. Her people, a remote blur, had gathered on the rocky outcrop where they intended to stay for the night. One of them — her mother or grandmother — had clambered to the rock’s highest point, and was calling to her through cupped hands. "Far!" It was a cry no ape could have made, not even Capo. This was a word.

The sun had begun to slide away from the zenith, and already the shadow at her feet had lengthened. Soon the animals would begin to stir; she would no longer be safe, no longer be shielded by the noon world’s somnolence.

Alone, far from her people, she felt a delicious frisson of fear. Every day, every chance she got, she ran too far; and every day she had to be called back. She did not have a name. No hominid had yet given herself a name. But if she had, it would have been Far.

She turned back toward the rock and began to run again, at her steady, ground-devouring pace.

There were twenty-four people in the band.

Most of the adults were dispersed over the landscape near the eroded sandstone bluff. They moved like slim shadows across the dusty ground, seeking out nuts and small game, silent, intent, expert. Mothers had taken their youngest children along, clamped to their backs or scuttling at their feet.