Evolution

To the eerie wail of their bone flutes, the party crossed kilometer after kilometer of tundra. Rood sat on top of the bundles piled up on the sled, his whip of cured hide ready for the boneheads’ backs. Millo sat up beside his father, hair streaming.

This was northern France. The hunting party, traveling southwest toward the Atlantic coast, would pass close to the eventual site of Paris. But the tree line — the latitude at which trees could grow tall — ran mostly many kilometers south of here. And not so far north of here lay the edge of the ice cap itself. Sometimes you could hear the wind howling off the ice, cold air that had spilled off the pole itself, a heavy, restless, relentless wind that had scoured clean a great chill desert at the feet of the glaciers.

The land was a patchwork of white and blue, with splashes of premature green. The sled’s runners hissed as they ran over trees: they were dwarf willows and birches, flattened forests that clung to the ground, hiding from the wind. It was a shallow land, a skim of life-bearing soil over a deeper layer of permafrost. It was dotted with lakes, most of them still frozen, glimmering blue with the deeper ice that would not melt all summer. The ponds and lakes and marshes of summer were actually little more than transient lenses of meltwater pooled over the permafrost.

But spring was coming. In places the grass was growing already, and ground squirrel ran and foraged busily.

The tundra was a surprisingly productive place. The plants included many species of grass, sedges, small shrubs, and herbaceous plants like types of pea, daisy, and buttercup. The plants grew quickly and abundantly, whenever they could. And the various plants’ short growing seasons did not overlap, so that for the animals that thrived here there was a long period of good feeding each year.

This complex, variegated mosaic of vegetation supported a huge population of herbivores. In eastern Europe and Asia there were hippos, wild sheep, and goat, red, roe, and fallow deer, boar, asses, wolves, hyenas, and jackals. In the west, here in Europe, there were rhinos, bison, boar, sheep, cattle, horses, reindeer, ibex, red and roe deer, antelope, musk oxen — and many, many carnivores, including cave bears and lions, hyenas, arctic fox, and wolves.

And — as Jahna saw, in the far south, as they worked across the snow-littered ground — mammoths.

There was a great herd of them — walking ponderously, in no hurry — a wall of bodies that stretched from one horizon to the other. They were not true migrants, but had spent the winter sheltering in valleys to the south, where immense herds would gather, channeled by geography. Their hair was a deep black-brown, but as they walked the curtains of guard hairs that hung from their trunks and flanks flowed and waved, shining golden in the low spring sunlight. They looked like boulders, bulky fur-covered boulders. But occasionally one would lift her head, and there would be a flash of trunk or curling tusk, and a thrilling, unmistakable trumpet. The woolly mammoths had become the most successful of all the ancient elephant lineages. They could be found throughout the great tundra belt that wrapped right around the planet’s pole, making a giant herd that outnumbered by far any other proboscidean species that had ever lived.

On these great open lands, where such huge prey walked across open ground, the hunting was as easy for humans as it would ever be, in all their history. But already times were changing; soon the ice would begin its retreat once more. And already, whether they realized it or not, people had started to reshape the life and the land, just as in Australia.

They were thinly scattered, and life seemed hard. But in a sense humans had already reached the peak of their fortunes.

As they traveled the hunters pointed out the features of the land to each other, every bluff and ridge, every river and lake. Everything was named, even features off in the far distance, and everybody was listened to with respect as they shared and confirmed their knowledge. In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

They told stories, too, about the animals they glimpsed — how they lived, what they thought, what they believed. Anthropomorphism, attributing to animals personalities and characters, was a powerful tool for a hunter. A mammoth or a bird did not think about its foraging and movement in the same way as a human would, of course, but imagining that it did could be an excellent predictor of the animal’s behavior.

So, as they traveled, they talked, and talked, and talked.