Evolution

Anyhow she was sitting with an infant, an odd-looking male with a peculiarly elongated upper lip: Elephant. He was actually one of Capo’s sons. He was sitting on the ground clutching his stomach and moaning loudly. Perhaps he had a worm, or some other parasite. Howl was moaning along with him, as if some of the pain had transferred to her body. She was plucking bristly leaves and making the youngster swallow them; the leaves contained compounds that were toxic to many parasites.

And there were Finger and Frond, he saw, grubbing their way along the forest floor. The young males were aiming for a little light thievery, it seemed to Capo — in fact, he realized angrily, they had their eyes on Capo’s own heap of fronds.

Capo contained his impatience. He sat under a tree, dropped his hammer-stone, picked up a stick and began to work methodically to clean out the spaces between his toes. He knew that if he made a dash for his palm nuts the others would get there first and pilfer the nuts. By loitering like this, he was making Frond and Finger believe that no nuts had been hidden at all.

Unlike Roamer, Capo was able to read the intentions of others. And Capo understood that others could have beliefs different from his own, that his actions could affect others’ beliefs. It was a capability that even made a limited kind of empathy possible: Howl really had been sharing the suffering of Elephant. But it also made possible ever more elaborate modes of deceit and treachery. He was able, in a sense, to read minds.

This new ability had even made him self-aware, in a new way. The best way to model the contents of another’s mind was to be able to study your own: If I saw what she sees, if I believed what she does, what would I do? It was an inward look, a reflection: the birth of consciousness. If Capo had been shown his face in a mirror he would have known it was him, not another ape in a window. His were the first animals since the hunters of Pangaea to have achieved such sophistication.

At last Frond and Finger moved away from the stash. Capo grabbed his hammer-stone and descended on his palm nuts. Capo would deliver beatings to the two of them later anyhow, on principle; they would never quite understand why.

He brushed aside the concealing fronds to expose his favorite anvil stone, a flat rock embedded in the ground. To protect his backside he spread some broad leaves over the moist ground. He sat down, legs tucked up to his chest. He set a palm nut on the anvil, holding it steady with finger and forefinger — and then brought down the hammer, snatching his fingers out of the way at the last moment. The nut rolled a little and squirted sideways unbroken; Capo retrieved it and tried again. It was a tricky procedure that took a lot of coordination. But it took Capo only three goes before he had cracked the first nut and was chewing out its flesh with his teeth.

Twenty-seven million years after Roamer and her habit of slamming nuts against branches, this was the height of technology on Earth.

Capo worked steadily on the nuts, losing himself in the tricky little procedure, pushing out of his mind the obscure worries that niggled him. It was high morning now, and for a time he felt content, satisfied in the knowledge that he had gotten enough food to stave off hunger pains for a few hours at least.

Elephant, drawn by the nuts’ rich smell, came to see what was happening. This youngster’s stomach problem had evidently been eased by Howl’s rough-and-ready bush medicine — or perhaps he had been faking it, to get some attention — and he was starting to feel hungry. He made out bits of nutshell scattered around the anvil stone, and even a few scraps of kernel. The youngster snatched these up and crammed them into his mouth.

Capo, grandly, let this pass.

Now Leaf came by with her infant clinging to her back.

Capo dropped his hammer-rock and reached for Leaf. Gently he began to groom her belly, an attention to which she submitted gracefully. Leaf, a big, gentle creature, was one of his favorite females. In fact she was favored by all of the troop’s males, and they would compete for grooming time with her.

But that wasn’t Capo’s way. Very soon his lumpy penis had sprouted from his fur, and Leaf had had all the grooming she was going to get. Leaf carefully lifted the infant from her back and put her down on the ground. Then she lay back and let Capo enter her. She arched her back as he thrust, so that her head was upside down, her weight balanced on her skull. These apes often mated face to face like this. Empathy again: They could share each others’ pleasure in grooming or mating.