Evolution

It had always hurt the Old Man to live alone; his kind were intensely social. But he had suffered more than just loneliness. His mind was of the old compartmented design. Much of what went on inside his cavernous skull was all but unconscious; it was as if his hands made his flint tools, not him. It was only when he was with people that he became truly alive, fully, intensely aware; it was as if without others he was in a dream, only half-conscious. To the Old Man’s kind, other people were the brightest, most active things in the landscape. With no other people around, the world was dull, lifeless, static.

That was why he had tolerated the skinny children, with their jabber and their meddling, why he had fed and even clothed them. And why he would soon face death.

Jahna whispered, "Millo. Look." Watching to be sure the bonehead couldn’t see, she brushed aside some dirt, and revealed a collection of blackened bones.

Millo gasped. He picked up a skull. It had a protruding face and a thick ridge over its gaping eyes. But it was small, smaller than Millo’s own head; it must have been a child. "Where did you find them?"

"In the ground," she whispered. "At the front of the cave, when I was clearing up."

Millo dropped the skull; it clattered onto the other bones. The bonehead looked around dully. "It’s scary," whispered Millo. "Maybe he killed it. The bonehead. Maybe he eats children."

"No, silly," Jahna said. Seeing her brother’s fear was real, she put her arms around him. "He probably just put it in the ground when it was dead."

But Millo was shivering. She hadn’t meant to scare him. She pushed the skull out of his sight and, to calm him, began to tell him a story.

"Listen to me now. Long, long ago, the people were like the dead. The world was dark and their eyes were dull. They lived in a camp as they do now, and they did the things they do now. But everything was dark, not real, like shadows. One day a young man came to the camp. He was like the dead too, but he was curious — different. He liked to go fishing and hunting. But he would always go deeper into the sea than anybody else. The people wondered why…"

As she crooned the story, Millo relaxed against her, sinking into sleep just as the sun sank into the ocean. Even the big bonehead was dozing, she saw, slumped against a wall, belching softly. Perhaps he was listening too.

Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales — which said that Jahna’s group were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human — taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.

But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such nonpeople as the Old Man’s kind.

"…One day they saw that the young man was with a sea lion. He was swimming in the waves with it. And he was making love to it. Enraged, the people drove out the young man, and they caught the sea lion. But when they butchered it they found a fish inside, in its womb. It was a fat fish." She meant a eulachon. "The fish had been fathered by the young man. He was neither person nor fish, but something different. So the people threw the fish-boy on their fire. His head burst into flames and made a bright light that dazzled them. So the fish-boy flew into the sky. The sky was dark, of course. There he sought the place where the light was hiding, because the fish-boy thought he could trick the light to come down to the dark world. And then…"

And then her father walked in.

The Old Man was a Neandertal.

His kind had endured in Europe, through the savage swings of the Ice Age, for a quarter of a million years. In their way the robust folk had been supremely successful. They had found ways to live here in the most marginal of environments, on the edge of the world, where the climate was not only harsh but could vary treacherously fast, where animal and plant resources were sparse and prone to fluctuate unpredictably.

For a long time they had even been able to resist the children of Mother. During warming pulses the new humans pushed into Europe from the south. But with their stocky bodies and big air-warming sinuses and heavily meat-tolerant digestion systems, the robusts were better able to withstand the cold than the moderns. And their bearlike builds made them formidable inflghters: tough opponents for the humans, better technology or not. Then, when the cold intensified again, the moderns would retreat back to the south, and the robust folk could repopulate their old lands.

This had happened over and over. In southern Europe and the Middle East there were caves and other sites where layers of human detritus were overlaid by Neandertal waste, only to be reoccupied by humans again.