Evolution

She felt nervous climbing around on top of the vegetation. She expected some ferocious aerial predator to bite into her skull at any moment. And as she moved she could feel the uneasy raft shift under her, its loosely tangled components rustling with the slow breathing of the sea. It felt as if the whole thing might disintegrate at any moment.

There were just six anthros: three males, two females — including Roamer — and the infant who still clung sleepily to the fur of its mother. These were the only survivors of Whiteblood’s troop.

The anthros sat on a tangle of branches, eyeing one another. It was time to form provisional hierarchies.

For the two females the priorities were clear enough.

The other female, the mother, was a burly individual more than a decade old. This child was her fourth and — though she could not know it — now her only surviving offspring. Her most noticeable characteristic was a fur-free patch of scar tissue on one shoulder where she had once been burned in a forest fire. The infant, clinging to Patch’s chest, was tiny, small even for its age, just a scrap of fur. Patch, the mother, studied Roamer dismissively. Roamer was small, young, and a stranger, not even remote kin. And, as a nursing mother, Patch would always have priority. So she turned her broad back on Roamer and began to stroke her infant, Scrap.

Roamer knew what she had to do. She scuttled over the branches to Patch, and dug her fingers into fur that was still moist and began to comb out tangles and bits of debris. When she probed at Patch’s skin, she found knots of muscle, and places which made Patch wince to be touched.

As Roamer’s strong fingers worked, Patch relaxed slowly. Patch, like all of them, had been battered by her precipitate removal from the forest, and was stressed by her sudden dumping into this extraordinary emptiness and the loss of her family. It was as if she could, for a moment, under the magic of the other’s touch, forget where she was. Even the infant, Scrap, seemed soothed by the contact between the two females.

Roamer herself was calmed by the simple, repetitive actions of the grooming, and by the subtle social bond she was building up with Patch.

The males’ negotiations were more dramatic.

Whiteblood found himself facing two younger males, brothers, in fact. One had a peculiar crest of snow-white hair that stuck up around his eyes, making him look permanently surprised, and the other had a habit of using his left arm predominantly over his right, so much so that the muscles on his left side were much more heavily developed than those on the right, like those of a left-handed tennis player.

Both Crest and Left were smaller and weaker than Whiteblood, and, younger, they had not outranked him back in the forest. But now Whiteblood had lost all of his allies, and together these two might defeat him.

So, without hesitation, he launched into a display. He stood upright, shakily, hooted and shrieked, and threw handfuls of leaves. Then he turned around, spread his backside and blew shit through moist fur.

Left was immediately intimidated. He shrank back, arms folded around himself.

Crest was more defiant, and answered Whiteblood’s display with a shrieking tantrum of his own. But he was outsized by Whiteblood and, without the support of his brother, could not hope to best the older male. When Whiteblood began to cuff him about the head and neck, Crest quickly backed down, tumbling onto his back and spreading his arms and legs like an infant, showing his submission. All of this was halted only when an incautious stamp plunged Whiteblood’s leg through the foliage and into the cold water. He yelped, pulled back his leg, and sat with legs folded beneath him, subdued.

But he had done enough. The brothers approached him now, their heads bent and postures humble. A brief interval of frantic mutual grooming ensured the new hierarchy was reinforced, and the three males started to pick bits of shit out of each other’s fur.

The rough-and-ready communities of Noth had been like street gangs, held together by not much more than brute force and dominance, with each individual aware of little more than her own place in the pecking order. But by now the advantages of social living had driven primate societies to baroque intricacy, and had spurred the development of new types of mind.

Group living required a lot of social knowledge: knowing who was doing what to whom, how your own actions fit in with this, who you had to groom and when, to make your life easier. The larger the group, the greater the number of relationships you had to keep track of, and as those relationships changed constantly, you needed still more computational capacity to handle it all. By allowing their group living to develop to such extremes of complexity, primates continued to get relentlessly smarter.

Not all primates, though.