Evolution

A kind of dull indecision raged within Capo. They shouldn’t stay here, out in the open; his body longed to climb a tree trunk, to pull together branches to make a cozy, warm, safe nest. But there were no trees here, no security to be had. On the other hand they couldn’t cross the valley floor in the dark. And they were all hungry, thirsty, exhausted.

He didn’t know what to do. So he did nothing.

The troop began to disperse, following their own instincts. Finger picked up a cobble-shaped, palm-sized rock, perhaps hoping to use it in some future nut-cracking project. But a scorpion scuttled out from beneath the rock, and Finger fled, hooting.

Frond was sitting alone with his back to the rest of the group, assiduously working at something. Capo, suspicious, loped up as quietly as he could on this loose, scattered gravel.

Frond had found a termite mound. He was sitting before it, clumsily poking sticks into it. When he saw Capo he cowered, screeching. Capo delivered brisk, perfunctory blows to his head and shoulders, as Frond would have expected. He should have hooted to the rest on discovering this bounty.

Capo ripped open a shrub. All of its branches were spindly and bent, and when he stripped a branch by passing it through his mouth, the hard, spiky leaves hurt his lips. But it would have to do. He sat alongside Frond. He pushed his stick into a crevice in the mound, and worked it until it had slid in deep. It was not ideal; the stick was too short and bent to be truly effective, but it would have to do. He jiggled it around, waiting patiently. Then he withdrew the stick, centimeter by centimeter. To the stick clung soldier termites, sent to defend the colony from this invader. Capo took great care not to dislodge this cargo. Then he swept the stick through his mouth, enjoying a mouthful of sweet, moist flesh.

When they saw what was going on the rest of the troop crowded around, the older ones making their own fishing sticks. Very quickly a rough pecking order established itself, lubricated by kicks, punches, hoots, and sly grooming. The more senior male and females alike got closest to the mound while the young, who didn’t understand what was happening anyhow, were excluded. Capo didn’t care. He just concentrated on holding his own position close to the mound while working assiduously at the termites.

The termites were antique creatures whose complex society was the result of their own long evolutionary story. This mound was ancient, built of the mud that had pooled here when infrequent rainstorms caused temporary floods. Its rock-hard carapace protected the termites from the attentions of most animals, but not these apes.

Capo’s use of tools — the termite-fishing sticks, the hammer-stones, the leaves he would chew to a sponge to extract water from hollows, even the fine toothpicklike sticks he sometimes used to perform crude dentistry — seemed sophisticated. He knew what he wanted to achieve; he knew what kind of tool he needed to achieve it. He would memorize the location of his favorite tools, like his hammer-stones, and made subtle decisions about using them — for instance trading off the distance he had to carry a hammer against its weight. And it wasn’t a case of just picking up a handy rock, found by chance; he modified some of his tools, like this termite-fishing stick.

And yet he was not like a human craftsman. His modifications were slight: his tools, abandoned after use, would have been hard to distinguish from the products of the inanimate world. The actions he used to make the tools were part of his normal repertoire, like biting, leaf stripping, stone throwing. Nobody had invented wholly new actions, like a potter’s clay throwing or a wood carver’s whittling. He used each tool for one use, and one use only; it never occurred to him that a termite fishing-stick might also be used as a toothpick. He did not improve his tools, once he had found a design that worked. And if — by some chance — he had in the course of his life happened upon a new kind of tool, however successful a design it was, its use would have spread only very slowly through his community, perhaps taking generations to reach every member. Coaching, the notion that the contents of someone else’s mind might be shaped by rehearsal and demonstration, had yet to be discovered.

So Capo’s tool kit was staggeringly limited, and very conservative. Capo’s ancestors, five million years gone, creatures of a different species, had used tools of only fractionally less sophistication. Capo wasn’t even aware he was using tools.

And yet here was Capo, working assiduously, knowing what he wanted, selecting materials to achieve his goal, making and shaping the world around him, the cleverest so far of all of Purga’s long line of descendants. It was as if a slow fire were smoldering in his eyes, his mind, his hands, a fire that would soon burn much more brightly.