Evolution

But among wolves, apes, pithecines, even the walkers, such campaigns had been inefficient. Without effective weapons, killings could be achieved only with overwhelming numbers, and it could take years for a war between two competing bands of thirty or forty pithecines to resolve itself. Even during the long age of the sedentary robusts, there had been little large-scale slaughter. Isolated strangers were killed, but there were no wars for lebensraum.

But now, as the genetic definition of Harpoon’s new nomadic people continued to spread, that was starting to change. Harpoon’s kind had accurate long-range weapons, and heads increasingly capable of systematic, orderly thinking; they were able to perform mass killing with unprecedented thoroughness. But there was a feedback effect. Warfare with other groups would force hominids to come together in increasingly large bands, with all the social complications that followed. The killing would shape the killers, too: If love was evolving, so was hate.

After cleaning out one particularly dense nest, Ko-Ko and the others had a kind of party. They dragged the bodies of the women, children, and men from the nest to an open space and piled them up — thirty, forty of them, all with ripped-open bellies, cleaved chests, smashed skulls. Then they began a fire, throwing burning branches onto the heap of bodies. Ko-Ko and the others danced around the burning corpses, whooping and hollering.

The skinny hunters dragged forward live captives. They were a mother and child, a spindly boy small enough to carry. The hunters had cornered her by a rock bluff where she had been trying to hide. Skinnies and robusts alike gathered around, hooting and yelling, and thrusting spears were raised before the mother’s face.

To Pebble the mother seemed numbed. Perhaps there was a kind of guilt written on that slim, protruding face. She had survived while others had fallen around her, all save her small child, and she was unable to feel anymore.

Ko-Ko stepped forward. With a simple efficient thrust, he drove the point of his thrusting spear into the woman’s chest. A black fluid burst from her skin. She convulsed — there was the too-familiar smell of death shit — and she slumped.

Still the infant lived. He was wailing, clinging to his mother and even trying to gnaw at her blood-streaked breast. But, just as a mother chasma had once pushed her pups toward hapless Elephant, so now Harpoon, her swollen belly proud before her, thrust Smooth toward the infant. Pebble’s daughter carried a stone chopping tool. With a lithe body so like her mother’s, she looked feverish, eager. And she raised the chopping stone over the infant’s flat skull.

Though he never shirked the fighting, the killing, suddenly Pebble longed to be away from here, sitting on a beach under a tall sunset, or digging for yams to bring home to his mother.

By the next morning the fire was burned out. The hominids had been reduced to gaunt skeletons, their blackened bodies wizened into fetal postures. Ko-Ko and Smooth stalked amongst the smoking remains, smashing them to pieces with the butts of their heavy thrusting spears.

CHAPTER 11 Mother’s People Sahara, North Africa. Circa 60,000 years before present.

I

Mother walked alone, a slim, upright figure in a tabletop landscape. The ground was hot under her feet, the dust sharp and prickling. She came to a stand of Hoodia cactus. She crouched down, cut off a stem about the size of a cucumber, and munched on its moist flesh.

She went naked save for a bolt of eland leather tied round her waist. She had a shaped stone in one hand, but carried nothing else. Her face was fully human, her brow smooth and upright, her chin sharp. But her mouth was pinched and her eyes were sunken, her gaze darting suspiciously.

The savannah around her was arid, dismal. The empty shadowless flatness stretched away, dissolving into a ghostly heat haze that obscured the encircling horizon, a flatness broken only by an occasional drought-resistant bush or the remains of an elephant-trampled copse. There wasn’t even any dung to be seen, for the great herbivores passed rarely now, and the beetles had long done their tidy and efficient work.

Clutching the cactus stem, she moved on.

She reached the edge of the lake — or where its edge had been last year, or perhaps the year before that. Now the ground was dry, a patina of dark, heat-cracked mud so hard it didn’t crumble when she put her weight on it. Here and there scrubby grass, yellow white, clung to life.

She cupped her hands over her eyes. The water was still there, but far from where she stood, just a remote shimmer. Even from here she could detect the dank stench of stagnation. On the lake’s far side she glimpsed elephants, black shapes moving like clouds through the glassy heat haze, and animals rooting in the mud — warthogs, perhaps.