Evolution

There weren’t even any fixed places for the fires. The scars of old fires were visible across the floor of the hut and outside in the blackened circles of scuffed pebbles and sand. When the wind changed or a part of the hut collapsed, they would just move the embers from yesterday’s fire to a new place and start again.

A human would have found the hut dark, low, claustrophobic, cluttered, disorganized, and filled with an unbearable stench, the stench of years of living. But to Pebble this was just the way things were, the way they always had been.

There were actually two fires being tended tonight. Hands had turned to the hot fire that had smoldered all day. He prowled around the settlement gathering bits of dried wood, and he carefully built up a pyramid of wood and chips to make a more intense, hotter fire. He had stripped the flesh off the head and limbs of a baby rhino, and now he would use his fire to crack the bones and get at the rich marrow inside.

Toward the rear of the hut, Dust and the woman Green were working on a second fire with Seal and Cry and some of the children. They had a handful of stones which they knapped quickly to make knives and borers, and with these they worked the food they had managed to gather during the day within a few hundred meters of the hut. This included shellfish — even a rat.

Soon, as they worked, smoke curled up into the plaited roof of the hut. All this took place against a background of grunts, murmurs, belches, and farts. Scarcely a word was spoken.

Cry was another survivor: She was the girl, younger than Pebble, who had escaped the occupation of their old settlement. She had taken her experiences hard. She had always been sickly and prone to weeping. Now she was seventeen and a full woman, and Pebble, like Hands and Hyena, had coupled with her more than once. But she had yet to fall pregnant, and her body, skinny and comparatively lightly built, had given Pebble no pleasure.

There was a peculiar economic arrangement among these people. Men and women largely foraged separately, ate separately.

Those who foraged for vegetation, seafood, and small game close to home — mostly women, but not exclusively — sat cooking it over their warm fire, relying on tools quickly made of local resources to help them eat. Those who roamed further to hunt — mostly men but not always — would devour much of the meat they secured on the spot themselves. Only if they had a surplus would they bring it home to share. The treat of the bone marrow was always kept back for the hunters, after the bones were cracked in the intense heat of their own fire.

Most of the time, the women’s foraging actually supplied most of the groups’ food, and in a way it subsidized the men’s hunting. But hunting, as it had always been, was about more than acquiring food. There was still an element of peacocklike display in the male hunters’ activities. In that, these people had not moved on much from Far’s time.

Other things were different, though. The stone tools the women used to prepare their food were massive, but their surfaces and edges looked crudely finished compared to the exquisite hand axes Ax had been able to make more than a million years ago. But for all its beauty a hand ax was not really a great deal more useful for most tasks than a simple, large-edged flake. In harsher times, men and women had had to learn to make their tools as efficiently as possible to suit the task at hand. Under this pressure, the ancient grip of the hand ax template began to weaken. It had been a mental unfreezing. Though in some corners of the planet the hand ax makers still wooed with their tokens of stone, with the dead hand of sexual selection lifted there had been a burst of inventiveness and diversity.

Gradually, a new kind of toolmaking had been discovered. A core of stone would be prepared in such a way that a single blow could then detach a large flake of the desired shape, which could then be retouched and finished. The flakes came with the finest possible edges — sometimes just a molecule thick — all the way around. And with sufficient skill you could make a wide variety of tools this way: axes, yes, but also spear points, cutters, scrapers, punchers. It was a much more efficient way of making tools, even if they looked cruder.

But this new method involved many more cognitive steps than the old. You had to be capable of seeking out the right raw materials — not every type of stone was suitable — and you had to be able to see not just the ax in the stone, but the blades that would eventually flow from the core.