Evolution

But it wasn’t that way for Mother. No, not at all.

In the days that followed that brutal ending and efficient burial, she returned again and again to the patch of ground that held her son’s bones. Even when the upturned ground began to fade in color, and the grass began to spread over it, still she remembered exactly where that hole’s ragged edges had been, and could imagine how he must be lying, there deep in the earth.

There was no reason for him to have gone. That was what plagued her. If she had seen him fall, or drown, or be trampled by the herds, then she could have seen why he died, and perhaps could have accepted it. Of course she had seen disease afflict many members of the tribe. She had watched many people die of causes no one could name, let alone treat. But that only made things worse: If someone had to die, why Silent? And if blind chance had killed him — if someone so close could be taken so arbitrarily — then it could happen to her, at any time, anywhere.

It couldn’t be accepted. Everything had a cause. And so there must be a cause of Silent’s death.

Alone, obsessing, she retreated into herself.

II

Soon after the time of Pebble and Harpoon had come an interglacial, an interval of temperate climes between the long, icebound millennia. The bloated ice caps had melted, and the seas had risen, flooding the lowlands and deforming the coastlines. But, twelve thousand years after Pebble’s death, this latest great summer drew to a close. A savage cooling cut in. The ice began to advance once more. As the ice sucked the humidity out of the air, it was as if the planet were drawing in a great, dry breath. Forests shrank, grasslands spread, and desertification intensified once more.

The Sahara, cupped in its mighty Himalayan rain shadow, was not yet a desert. Wide, shallow lakes lay across its interior — lakes, in the Sahara. These bodies of water waxed and waned, and sometimes dried out completely. But at their greatest extents they were full of fish, crocodile, and hippos. Around the waters gathered ostriches, zebra, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, and various antelope — and animals that modern eyes would not have thought so characteristically African, like oxen, Barbary sheep, goats, and asses.

Where there was water, where there was game, there were people. This was the environment that cradled Mother’s people. But it was a marginal place, the skim of life shallow. People had to work hard to survive.

And people were still scattered remarkably thin.

No humans had yet moved out of Africa. In Europe and across Asia, there were only the heavy-browed robusts and, in places, the older forms, the skinny walkers. America and Australia were still empty altogether.

Even in Africa people were thin on the ground. The more mobile, trade-based way of life that had been born with Harpoon and her kind had not been a uniform blessing. Ever since the move out of the forests, hominids had been vulnerable to trypanosomes — the parasites that caused sleeping sickness — carried by the clouds of tsetse flies that followed the savannah’s ungulate herds. Now such diseases were spreading. The people’s trading networks had proven very effective at exchanging goods, cultural innovations, and genes — but also at transmitting pathogens.

And, culturally, things weren’t happening.

Pebble would have recognized almost everything in Mother’s camp. People still split stone flakes off prepared cores, and still wrapped hide around their bodies, tied in place with bits of sinew or leather. Even their language was still a formless jabber of concrete words for things, feelings, actions, useless for transmitting complex information.

Across seventy thousand years these people — humans with as modern a body plan, even as modern a brain, as any twenty-first-century citizen — had scarcely made a single innovation in their technology or techniques. It had been a time of stupefying passivity, stunning stasis. After all this time, people were just another tool-using animal in the ecology, like beavers or bowerbirds, still little more than glorified chimps. And, bit by bit, they were losing their battle to survive.

Something was missing.

She could just walk off into the dust, alone.

Why live in a world without Silent?

But in the end she came out of the worst of her darkness.

Once again she started to gather food, eat, and drink. She had to: If she had not, she would have died. This was not a rich society. Though care was taken of the weak, the injured, and the elderly, there was little energy to spare for those who would not help themselves.

She had always been a skillful hunter and sharp-eyed forager. With the tools she invented, modified, or improvised, she was actually more effective than some of those younger and stronger than she was. She recovered rapidly. But the confusion in her head didn’t dissipate.

She wasn’t sure what first gave her the impulse to make the markings in the rock.