Evolution

As they worked their endless way through the forest, the friendships of the females quietly endured. The truth of Capo’s society was that the females were its foundation. The females stuck to their kinship groups and shared the food they found — a practice that made good genetic sense, as your aunt and nieces and sisters shared your own heritage. As for the males, they just went where the females went, their dominance battles a kind of showy superstructure, signifying very little of true importance for the troop.

With a moist dick and pleasantly aching fists, and the prospect of a belly soon to be filled, Capo ought to have been as happy as he could be. Life was good, here in the forest. For Capo, top of the heap, it could hardly get any better. But still that bit of unease lingered.

Unfortunately for Capo’s mood, the pickings that morning were poor. They were forced to keep moving.

They came across other animals, here in the forest. There were okapi — short-necked giraffes — and pygmy hippos and dwarf forest proboscideans. It was an ancient fauna clinging to the conservatism of forest ways. And there were other primates too. They passed a pair of giants: huge, broad-shouldered, silver-haired creatures who sat massively on the ground, feeding on the leaves they plucked from the trees.

They were like the potbellies of Roamer’s day. Capo’s forebears had developed a new kind of teeth, the better to cope with their fruit diet: Capo had large incisors for biting, necessary for fruit, whereas his molars were small. These leaf eaters’ teeth were the other way around; leaves didn’t need much biting but took a lot of chewing. Closely related to the gigantopithecines of Asia, these great beasts, weighing a quarter of a ton each, were among the largest primates who would ever live. But the giants were rare in Africa now.

They were not in direct competition with Capo’s troop, who, lacking the giants’ immense multiple fermenting stomachs, could not feed on leaves. Still, it bothered Capo to have to divert his course to avoid these silent, patient, statuesque creatures. Not wishing to lose face, Capo knuckle-walked up to the larger of the giants — a male — and displayed, fur bristling, running in circles, drumming on the ground. The leaf eater watched, impassive and incurious. Even sitting down he towered over Capo.

Honor satisfied, Capo skirted the giants and moved on.

It wasn’t long before the morning march came to an end, as the troop ran out of trees.

Here was the root of Capo’s unease. This shrinking, half-flooded patch of forest was not as abundant a home as it used to be. It was just an island, in fact, in a greater, more open world.

Peering out of the trees, he glimpsed that world, still emerging from a misty dawn.

This scrap of forest lay in the palm of an extensive, glimmering plain. The land was like a park, a mix of open green plains and patches of forest. Much of the forest was palms and acacias, but there was some mixed woodland, both conifers and deciduous trees — walnut, oak, elm, birch, juniper.

What would most have surprised Roamer, Capo’s distant great-aunt, was the nature of the ground cover that stretched over those open green areas. It was grass: hardy, resistant, now spreading with slow, unheralded triumph across the world.

And on the plain there were many, many lakes, ponds, marshes. Mist rose everywhere, the sun’s early heat filling the air with moisture. A great river, having spilled from the southern highland, curled lazily over the plain. Around its banks stretched extensive floodplains, some of them marshy or sheets of open water. The land was like a full sponge, brimming with water. Some of the trees were dying, their roots in some cases actually standing in shallow water. The forest remnants, already shrunken by the world’s continuing cooling and drying, were being drowned.

This soggy plain stretched to the north as far as Capo’s eyes could see. But off to the south the land climbed to an immense wall notched by the outflow of that mighty river. Before that great ridge was a more barren area littered with wide, bone-white sheets of salt, on some of which stood small, stagnant-looking lakes.

There was a bellow from the north, and Capo turned back that way. The animals of the plain were going about their business. In the distance Capo could see what looked like a herd of wild, overgrown pigs rooting in the long grasses. Their low-slung gray-brown bodies made them look like huge slugs. They were not pigs or hippos; they were anthracotheres, a holdover from much more ancient times.