Evolution

Far joined the women.

She quickly found a horseshoe crab, crawling stiffly along a muddy channel. It was easy to catch. She held it upside down, and it waved its clawed legs feebly. She used a bit of stone to open up its head shield, which was the size of a dinner plate. Inside, near the front, there was a mass of eggs, like fat rice grains. She scooped them out with her fingers and gulped them down. The flavor was very strong, like oily fish. The rest of the crab’s meat proved too tough to be worth digging out. She flipped away the smashed head shield, and moved on in search of more food.

Thus the day wore on, as the people foraged for their food, just another type of animal on this crowded savannah.

As midday approached, the hominids moved away from the water, relaxed, satiated.

But Ax struck out on his own. Far trailed after him. He gazed back at her. She knew he was aware she was following him.

Ax came to a dried-up streambed laced with worn cobbles. He walked up and down the bed, examining the rocks, until he found what he wanted. It was a cobble about the size of his fist, flattened and rounded. He sat squat in the streambed and rummaged around until he found a suitable hammer-stone. He had brought some dried brush that he spread over his crossed legs for protection. Then he went to work, tapping at the core he had selected. Soon flakes flew away, briskly rattling off the cobble.

Far sat ten meters away, her legs folded before her, hugging her knees, fascinated by his toolmaking. It was like nothing she had seen before.

In fact, Ax and Far had grown up in toolmaking traditions separated by millennia.

Once they had put the trees behind them and moved definitively out onto the savannah, a new range of possibilities had opened up for the walkers. They were more than merely mobile. They migrated. But it wasn’t purposeful. For each individual, it was just a question of making a living. For people able to exploit new landscapes, it was often easier to walk to somewhere that looked a better place to live than to try to adapt to harsh conditions.

But as the generations ticked by the people covered thousands of kilometers. They even walked out of Africa, into lands where no hominid had set foot before. Before the great clamp of the glaciations tightened, equable conditions had spread well out of Africa into southern Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia. Walking into these familiar surroundings the people followed the easy living of the coastlines, west around the Mediterranean and diffusing inland, at last colonizing Spain, France, Greece, Italy — as did animals later associated only with Africa, like elephants, giraffes, and antelope. To the east, they worked through India to the Far East, suffusing through what would become China, even working south to reach Indonesia.

It was not a conquest. Far’s kind had become far more widespread than any other ape species. But other animals, like the elephants, spread much further. And there were fewer of them. Their numbers in any given area were less than lions, say. Despite their tools the people were still just big animals in a landscape on which they had minimal impact.

And the great wandering was not purposeful. One of Far’s distant grandmothers had reached as far as Vietnam; now, in Far’s time, chance and the endless walking had brought her lineage back to East Africa, to home.

But here, in the ancient homelands, the returning migrants encountered new pressures.

Some hominid populations had elected not to move, despite the climate’s treacherous fluctuations. To survive they had been forced to become smarter. Better tools — crucially, the hand axes — had been the key to their survival. The ax’s secret was its teardrop shape. A flattened bi-faced shape gave a long cutting edge for minimal weight. Though they would still use simple pithecine-like flake tools if they needed to — the flakes, easy to make, were "cheap" and were actually better for some tasks, like tackling small prey — the hand axes were used not just for butchering meat, but for hacking sticks and clubs from branches, sharpening wooden spears, opening up beehives, digging into logs to get at larvae, peeling off bark, shredding pith, and opening the shells of tortoises and turtles. It was from a group of these stay-at-homes that Ax was descended.

Which was how Far, descendant of wanderers who had crossed southern Eurasia all the way to the Far East, now found herself confronted by the startlingly advanced technology of Ax and his kind.

Ax worked patiently. Her gaze wandering, Far noticed now that the dry bed here was littered with hand axes: many of the rocks she had assumed were just cobbles had actually been shaped. They all had the characteristic teardrop shape, and were all worked to a greater or lesser degree to give that fine edge all the way around the tool.