Evolution

Far’s mother was working through a small stand of acacia trees that had been comprehensively destroyed by the passage of a herd of deinotheres. These ancient elephant types had used their downward-pointing tusks and stubby trunks to leave the trees broken and splintered, the ground churned up, and the roots hauled out. People weren’t the only foragers here: warthogs and bushpigs grunted and squealed as they pushed their ugly faces into the churned-up earth. The destruction was recent. Far could see giant beetles at work burying fresh deinothere dung, and aardvarks and honey badgers rooting in the ground, seeking the beetles’ larvae.

Such a place made for good foraging. A good strategy for finding food in an unfamiliar land was to seek out the leftovers of other animals, especially destructive types like elephants and pigs. In the smashed-up stand of trees, Far’s mother would find food that would have otherwise been hidden or inaccessible. Among the broken trunks there were even ready-made levers, struts, and digging sticks to prize out roots from the ground, broken branches to shake to get at fruit, and slivers of palm to dig out pith.

Far’s mother was a serene, elegant woman, tall even for her kind; she might have been called Calm. She walked with her two children, the sleeping baby cradled over one shoulder, and a son. The boy was half Far’s age but already nearly as tall as she was, a skinny youth Far thought of as the Brat: irritating, clever, and much too successful at competing for their mother’s attention and generosity.

Calm’s own mother, Far’s grandmother, was at her side. In her mid-forties now, the grandmother was too stiff to be of much help digging for food. But she assisted her daughter by keeping an eye on the youngest child. No human would have been surprised to see old people in this group; it would have looked very natural. But no previous types of primates had grown old; few had survived much past their fertile years. Why should their bodies continue to keep them alive when they could not contribute further to the gene pool? But now it was different; among Far’s kind, old people had a role.

Panting, dusty, Far climbed the rock. It was just an outcrop a hundred meters across bearing nothing but strands of tough grass and a few insects and lizards. But for the people it was a temporary home base, an island of comparative sanctuary in this open savannah, this sea of danger. On the outcrop itself a couple of men were repairing wooden spears. They worked absently, eyes roving, as if their hands were working by themselves. Some of the older children played, rehearsing for the adulthood to come. They wrestled, chased, mock-stalked each other. Two six-year-olds were engaged in clumsy foreplay, fingering each other’s nipples and bellies.

Far was neither an adult nor a child, and in this small band there was nobody close to her age. So she kept away from the rest and walked to the summit of the eroded sandstone lump. She found a bit of antelope jaw, deposited here by some scavenger, now scraped clean by hungry mouths and the patient work of insects. She cracked the bone into fragments on the rock, and used a sharp edge to scrape the sweat and dirt from her legs and belly.

From this vantage, the landscape was laid out, presenting a complex panorama. This was an immense valley. Huge geological anguish showed in a panorama of domes, lava flows, tiltings, and craters. To the east — and, beyond the horizon, in the west — the land had been uplifted, forming a plateau some three thousand meters high at its maximum, laden with fertile volcanic soil. The great plateau came to an end in a precipitate wall that plunged down into the valley.

This was the Rift Valley: a fracture between two separating tectonic plates. It ran for three thousand kilometers from the Red Sea and Ethiopia in the north down through Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi, terminating in Mozambique to the south. For twenty million years geological activity along the length of this great wound had created volcanoes, built highlands, and collapsed lowlands into valleys that channeled the waters into some of the continent’s largest lakes. The land itself had been remolded, laid down as layer upon layer of volcanic ash, interspersed with broad beds of shale and mudstone. On the volcanic hills grew humid forests, and a complex mosaic of vegetation, from woodland to savannah to scrub, filled the floor. It was a crowded, jumbled, varied place.

And it was full of animals.