Their social lives had changed too. In the dense forest, where there was always a supply of leaves and bark, stable groups of females came together to live off a single patch of forest. Males became solitary, each trying to maintain his hold over the females in his territory. So the males became larger than the females, and there was a premium on brute physical strength, so that each male could fight off those who would usurp him.
The gorilla-man’s kind were among the least intelligent of the hominids of his day. That big gut was very energy expensive; to balance its budget his body, in the course of its adaptation, had had to make sacrifices elsewhere. Smarts weren’t essential among the harems in the dim, stable gloom of the deep forest, and so the gorilla folk’s big primate brains, very costly in blood and energy, had dissolved.
But because the gorilla-man could be sure of sexual access to his females, his testicles were small. By comparison the skinny pithecine chimp-men had to mate as often as possible with as many females as they could, and needed the large, pendulous balls they displayed so readily, to produce oceans of sperm.
Within these basic pithecine types, the gracile chimp folk and the robust gorilla types, there were many variants. Some enhanced their bipedalism. Some all but abandoned it. Some skinnies were smarter than others; some gorilla folk were dumber than the rest. There were skinnies who used tools even less advanced than Capo’s, and gorilla types who used tools more sophisticated than the gracile pithecines’ stone flakes. There were large and small, skulkers and runners, pygmies and giants, slim omnivores and pillar-toothed herbivores. There were creatures with protruding faces like a chimp’s and others with delicate, flat features almost like a human’s. And there was much crossbreeding among the types, a proliferation of subspecies and hybrids, ornamenting the carnival of hominid possibilities.
Baffled paleontologists of the future, trying to piece this diversity together from fragmentary fossils and stone tools, would devise elaborate family trees and nomenclatures, calling their imagined species Kenyanthropus platypus; or Orrorin tugenenis; or Australopithecus garhi, africanus, afarensis, bahrelghazali, anamensis; or Ardipithecus ramidus; or Paranthropus robustus, boisei, aethiopicus; or Homo habilis. But few of the names fit the reality. And besides, the boundaries between these categories of creature were very blurred. Out in the real world, of course, such labels did not matter; there were only individuals, struggling to survive and raise their offspring, as they always had.
Most of the diverse assemblage here would be lost in time, their poor bones swallowed up forever by the forest’s voracious green. No human would ever know how it was to live in a world like this, crowded with so many different types of people. It was a bubbling evolutionary ferment, as many variants were spun off a fundamentally successful new body plan.
But none of this myriad of species had a future, for all these ape folk had clung to the forest. Their fingers and toes remained long and curved to help grab hold of tree trunks, and their legs were a peculiar compromise between the needs of knuckle-walking tree climber and those of biped. At night they would even make treetop nests like their forest-dwelling ancestors before them. And their brains never developed much beyond the size of Capo’s, and those of their cousins, the ancestral chimps, because their low-quality diet could sustain nothing bigger.
For four million years the pithecines had been a wide, diverse, very successful flourishing of the hominid family. Once, in fact, the only hominids in the world had been ape-men. But their time of significant change was already over. They had been seduced by the shelter and protection of the forest, and this had robbed them of much possibility. The future lay with another group of hominids — descendants of pithecine stock themselves — but who, unlike any pithecine, had made the decisive break away from the forest.
The future lay with Far.
III
Reluctantly she opened her eyes. She saw a patch of dirty ground, tilted up under her face. When she raised her head she could see brightness filtering through the dense tree trunks.
She pushed at the ground, and got her body off the floor. Leaves and dirt stuck to her breasts and injured shoulder. She used a tree trunk to pull herself upright, and stood still until the pounding of her heart subsided. Then she began to stagger as best she could through the forest toward the light.
She stumbled out into the day. She raised her hand, shielding her eyes against a low, reddening sun. The land was scorched, the grass blackened, the ground cracked and dried. But beyond a low rise she saw the glint of water: a stream that rolled from eroded hills a little further away.
She didn’t know this place. She had come right through the patch of forest, from east to west.
She stepped forward gingerly. The scorched ground was still hot — here and there tree stumps and bushes still smoked — and the crisped grass blades hurt her feet. Soon her lower legs, already filthy from her time in the forest, were coated with a deep black soot.
But she made it to the water. The stream was clear and fast moving. It ran over a bed of rounded volcanic cobbles, and bits of blackened vegetation skimmed over its surface. She plunged in her face and drank deeply. The dirt and dried blood washed off her skin, and the lingering stink of smoke in her nose and throat began to dissipate.
And then she heard a call. A voice. A word. But it wasn’t a word she knew.
She scrambled out of the water and threw herself flat behind an eroded boulder. In her world, strangers were bad news. Like their pithecine cousins her nomadic people were fiercely xenophobic.
A man knelt on the ground, his hands nimbly exploring the scorched soil for any pickings the fire had left behind. He was young, his skin smooth, his hair thick.
He picked up a blackened lizard, stiff and immobile. With a kind of shaped stone — its form wasn’t familiar to her — he scraped off the charred skin, exposing a morsel of pink flesh that he gulped down quickly. Now he found a snake, an adder, scorched to stiffness. Though he tried cutting through its burned skin it was too tough, and he threw the little corpse away.
Now the man found a real treasure. It was a tortoise, cooked in its shell. He picked it up and turned it over, muttering to himself. He took his handheld tool — it was a stone flake, but it was triangular, with each face worked, and a sharp edge all around it — and jammed it into the tortoise’s neck entrance. With a little effort he cracked open the shell, and soon he was using the tool to slice up the meat. Tortoises were actually a favorite prey of pithecine hunters. They were one of the few savannah animals that were even smaller and slower than hominids, and the tortoises’ habit of burrowing into the ground did not save them from clever animals able to dig them out with sticks and who had tools able to open up shells impervious to the teeth of lions and hyenas.
Far was fascinated by the young man’s stone ax. With its finely worked edge and shaped faces, it was far beyond her own people’s chopping stones and pithecine-like flakes. But she understood it immediately, at a deep somatic level; she had an impulse to reach out and take the stone teardrop, to try it out for herself.
As long as she knew him, she would associate this young man with the stone tool he wielded so expertly. She would think of him as Ax.
Suddenly Ax looked up, straight into Far’s eyes.
She cowered back behind her boulder, but it was too late.
He growled and dropped the tortoise — its shell clattered on the sooty ground — and held up his stone ax.