Evolution

But these axes were strange. Some of the axes were tiny, the size of butterflies, while some were huge. Some of them were broken, some smeared with blood. But when she tried to pick up one of the larger axes, its edge cut into her fingers; it had hardly been used, if at all.

Someone walked up to her. She cowered back.

It was Scar-face, the man who had taught the children how to knap rock. He was looking at Far with a kind of hungry intensity. He had one of the huge axes in his hands. It was impractically large, too large to use to butcher. Still gazing at her he turned it over in his hands, and tapped at it with a hammer-stone, tidying up an edge. Then he scraped it over his leg, and removed a swath of the fine black hair that grew there. All through this he watched Far’s face and body, his half-covered eye gleaming.

She had absolutely no idea what he wanted — none, that is, until she saw the erection poking out of his tuft of pubic hair.

Ax had more or less finished the blade he was making: hand-sized, utilitarian, rough and ready, it was clearly a functional tool, manufactured in minutes. But when he saw what Scar-face was doing he threw down his ax angrily. He got up, scattering his spill of flakes, and punched the man’s shoulder. "Away! Away!"

Scar-face snarled back, his erection subsiding. At last Ax grabbed the huge gaudy ax out of his hands, and threw it to the ground. Part of its beautiful edge sheared off. Scar-face looked at the ax, at Far, and, with a final glare at Ax, walked away.

Far sat where she was, her knees tucked against her chest, fearful and baffled.

Ax stared at her. Then he stalked up and down the dry stream again, surveying the stones. At last he came across a big malformed volcanic block, so heavy it took two hands to lift it. He sat down again, picked up a few hammer-stones, scattered more brush over his legs.

He started to slam at the rock, displaying all his strength. Flakes and sheets of it began to fall away. But very quickly, thanks to his skill and strength, a crude hand ax teardrop shape emerged. Now he started to use a succession of smaller stones to shape the two lenticular surfaces, and to finish the edge to a fine blade.

Where his first effort had come easily, borne out of a rock that had already had the rough shape of the final ax, this rock was much more difficult. He couldn’t have picked a tougher challenge — and he had chosen it deliberately. And all through this he made sure Far was watching him.

The walking folk had already been making tools more or less like this for two hundred thousand years. Over such an immense span of time, the axes had become more than mere tools, more than functional.

To Ax, this feat of toolmaking was a kind of courtship. He was displaying his fitness as a mate to Far. By making the tool he was showing her in one clear demonstration the strength of his body, the precision of his working, the clarity of his mind, his ability to conceive and see through a design, his skill for locating raw materials, his coordination of hand and eye, his spatial skills, his understanding of the environment around him. All of these were traits he expected she would want to pass on to her offspring — and that was why such displays had acquired a logic of their own, divorced from the utility of the hand axes.

Driven by lust and longing, men and boys would make dozens of axes, over and over. They would labor for hours over a single ax, seeking perfect symmetry. They would make tiny axes the size of their thumbnails, or they would make huge unwieldy affairs that would have to be held in two hands like an open book. They would, as Ax had, seek out particularly difficult raw materials and go ahead and carve out axes anyhow. Sometimes they would even throw away their axes, deliberately, to show how rich they were in strength and skill.

It was even worth trying to cheat, as Scar-face had done. It didn’t work very often — women quickly learned they had to see the most impressive ax being made before them — but occasionally it paid off, and the liar got a chance to pass on his genes at very low cost.

This mixing up of toolmaking with sexual courtship would have a profound effect on the future. As no male could afford not to make axes just as his forefathers had done, it was a recipe for stultifying conservatism. These people would make the same tool to the same plan, over and over, across several continents, despite several glacial cycles, for a million years. Even the different species who followed them would continue with the same technology. It was a continuity and a consistency that no institution, no religion would ever match. Only sex had a strong enough hold on the human mind to have achieved such a vast freezing.