Evolution

When the eating was finished, the people drifted to other tasks. The woman Green prepared a bit of antelope leather, biting on it and pulling it across her teeth. She was an expert at working animal skin, and her teeth, worn and chipped, showed their years of use. The smaller children were getting sleepy now. They gathered into a rough ring and began to groom each other, running their little fingers through the knotted hair on each other’s heads. Hands was trying to tend to Hyena. He inspected the wound under its poultice, sniffed, and pushed the poultice back into place.

Dust, exhausted as she often was these days, had already lain down beside her fire. But she was awake, her eyes gleaming. Pebble understood. She was missing Flatnose, her "husband."

The people had paid a price for the increasingly large brains of their children. Pebble had been born utterly helpless, with much of his brain development still to come, a long period of growth and learning ahead of him before he could survive independently. The support of grandmothers was no longer enough. A new way of living had had to evolve.

Parents had to stick together, for the sake of their children: it was not monogamy, but it was close. Fathers had learned it was essential to stay around if their genetic inheritance was to go on to further generations. But women’s ovulation was concealed, and they were almost continually sexually receptive. It was a lure: If a man was going to invest in raising a kid, he needed to be confident the kid really was his — and if he didn’t know when his partner was fertile, the only way to ensure that was to stay around.

But it wasn’t all compulsion. Couples preferred sex in private — or as much as was possible in such a close, small community. Sex had become a social cement that bound couples together. Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

But the shaping was not complete. The desultory talk in this crude hut was not much more than gossip. Toolmaking, food gathering, and other activities were still walled off from consciousness, in compartmented, if roomy, minds. And they still groomed like apes.

They were not human.

Pebble felt irritable, restless, confined. Gruffly he grabbed a slice of rhino belly from Seal, who protested loudly: "Mine, mine!" Then he went to sit, alone, in the doorway, facing the sea.

Close by, he could see the scrubby land where the people cleared away weeds from peas and beans and yams. But beyond that, looking north and west, a sunset towered into the sky, its purple-pink light painting the planes of his face. It was a magnificent Ice Age sunset. The glaciers, scouring across the northern continents, had thrown vast amounts of dust into the air; the sun’s light was refracted through great clouds of ground-up rock.

Pebble felt stuck, like one of Seal’s little fish glued to his blobs of spiderweb.

Barely conscious of what he was doing, he felt around on the ground for a sliver of rock. When he had found one sharp enough he lifted it to his right arm — he had to look for a patch that wasn’t already scarred — and he pressed the stone to his flesh, relishing the delicious prickling pain.

He wished his father were here, so they could cut together. But the stone remained, the pain almost comforting as it pushed through his epidermis. He ran the stone blade down his arm, feeling the warmth of his own blood. He shuddered with the pain, but relished its cold certainty, knowing he could stop at any moment, yet knowing he would not.

Isolated, depressed, his life blocked, Pebble had turned in on himself, and a behavior that had once served to enable young men to compare their strength in a reasonably harmless way had become solitary and destructive. Pebble’s kind were not human. And yet they knew love, and loss — and addiction.

In the darkness behind him, his mother watched, her bone-hooded eyes clouded.

Pebble was woken in the gray of the predawn — but not by the light or the cold.

A tongue lapped at his bare foot. It was almost comforting, and it penetrated his uneasy dreams. Then he woke enough to wonder what was doing the licking. His eyes snapped open.

A shaggy, muscular wolf stood on all fours before him, silhouetted against the dawn sky.

He yelped and dragged his legs back. The wolf whined, startled. Then it scampered away a few paces, turned and growled.

But a person stood beside the wolf.