As their bodies had been redesigned, the apes had become smarter.
In these tropical climes fruit trees rarely fruited simultaneously. Even when you found a fruiting tree, you might have a long way to travel to the next. So the apes needed to spend much of each day searching for patchy resources, foraging alone or in small groups, collecting together again to sleep in the treetop refuges. This basic architecture of food gathering had shaped their social lives. For one thing they needed to understand their environment very well if they were to find the food they needed.
And, given the way they lived their lives, their bonding was loose. They could split and recombine, forming special relationships with other members of the community, even though they might not see them for weeks at a time. Keeping track of a multileveled, fissile social complexity required increasing smartness. As the apes juggled their relationships, it was as if they were living through a soap opera — but it was a social maelstrom that honed their developing minds.
In the first years after the great split of the archaic anthropoid stock into apes and monkeys, the apes had become the Old World’s dominant primates. Though shrinking climate belts restricted them to the middle latitudes, there was plenty of room for them in a continuous band of forest that had spanned the whole of Africa and stretched across Eurasia from China to Spain. Following this green corridor the apes had walked out of Africa and spread through the Old World forests. In fact, they had migrated alongside the proboscideans.
At their peak there were more than sixty ape species. They had ranged from cat-sized to the size of a young elephant. The largest, like the giants, were leaf eaters, the midsized — those the size of Capo — took fruit, but the smallest, weighing under a kilogram or so, were insectivores, like their remote ancestors. The smaller the animal, the faster its metabolism and the higher the quality of the food it demanded. But there was room for everybody. It had been an age of apes, a mighty anthropoid empire.
Sadly for them it hadn’t lasted.
As the world continued to cool and dry, the great forest belts had shriveled into isolated islands, like this one. The vanishing of forest connections between Africa and Eurasia had isolated the Asian ape populations, which would develop independently of events in Africa, into the orangutan and its relatives. With the reduced ranges had come a dwindling of numbers. Most ape species had, in fact, already long gone extinct.
And then had come the rise of a new competitor.
Capo reached a clump of foliage where, he knew, this particular acacia had an especially productive patch of flowers. But he found the spiny branches already stripped. When he pried them aside he was met by a small, startled black face, fringed by white fur and a gray topknot. It was a monkey — like a vervet — and juice dribbled from its small mouth. It peered into Capo’s eyes, squealed, and shot out of sight before he could do anything about it.
Capo rested for a while, scratching his cheek thoughtfully.
Monkeys were a pest. Their great advantage was that they were able to eat unripe fruit. Their bodies manufactured an enzyme to neutralize the toxic chemicals used by the trees to protect their fruit until their seeds were ready to germinate. The apes could not match this. So the monkeys were able to strip the trees before the apes even arrived. They were even moving out into the grasslands, feeding off the nutlike seeds to be found there. To the apes, the monkeys were as tough a competition as the rodents had always been.
High over Capo’s head, a slim form moved, swinging gracefully and purposefully. It was a gibbon. It raced through its forest canopy at extraordinary speed. It used its body as a pendulum to gain momentum, and, like a child on a fairground swing, it pumped its legs up and down to build up its speed.
The gibbon’s body was a kind of extreme version of the apes’ long-armed, flat-chested design. The ball-and-socket joints in its shoulders and wrists had been freed up so that the gibbon could hang from its arms and twist its body through a full circle. With its low weight and extreme flexibility, the gibbon could hang from the outermost branches of the highest trees, and it was able to reach the fruits that grew at the end of the thinnest branches, safe from even tree-climbing predators. And, able to hang upside down from branches, it could reach goodies out of the grasp of other apes, who were too heavy to climb so high, and even the monkeys, who ran along the tops of the branches.
Capo peered up at the gibbon with a kind of envy for a grace, speed, and skill he could not match. But, magnificent though it was, the gibbon was not a triumph for the apes but a relic, forced by the competition it had lost to the monkeys to eke out its living on the ecological margins.
Vaguely disappointed, still hungry, Capo moved on.
At length Capo found another of his favorite resources, a stand of oil palms. The nuts of this tree had rich, oily flesh — but they were enclosed in a particularly hard outer case that rendered them immune to most animals, even the clever fingers of monkeys. But not to apes.
Capo hurled handfuls of the nuts down to the ground, then clambered down after them. He collected the nuts together, carried them to the roots of an acacia he knew, and hid them under a heap of dried palm fronds.
Then he worked his way out toward the perimeter of the forest, to where he had stashed his hammer-stones. These were cobbles that fit neatly into the palm of his hand. He selected one and headed back to his nut stash.
On his way back he passed the adolescent Howl. Briefly he considered mating her again, but Capo’s attention once a day was enough of an honor for any female.
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.