After several nights, she was sure; horrified, but sure.
The creatures she had seen by the river were featured heavily in many books she had read at Harvard on human evolution, and several that she had studied during her recent research.
They were members of the extinct hominid subspecies Homo neanderthalensis.
This realization confirmed her recognition of the massive furred creatures she had seen that first day as ground sloths, animals that were also long since extinct.
Her astronomy was better than her paleontology, and yet it had only served to confirm her fears.
The night sky was very similar through time, but over very large timeframes, there were subtle differences that could be observed, even with the naked eye. She knew that Neanderthal man had died out tens of thousands of years ago but this did not help to prepare her for the conclusions she drew from her astral observations, for the position of the stars in the sky were as they would have been about two hundred thousand years ago.
She had indeed been caught in the wormhole, but instead of bending the fabric of the cosmos in order to send the Anunnaki through space, it had instead sent her through time.
And as she considered what had happened, she couldn’t help but remember the words of Professor Travers.
‘Yes,’ he had said when asked about the Anunnaki, ‘and don’t ask me how they evolved, as they don’t even know themselves. One moment the earth had other Homo species, including ergastor, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, neanderthalensis, among others, and the next we had Homo sapiens sapiens, fully formed not only physically but also mentally.’
And as she sat by the banks of the river, and once more touched Matthew Adams’ baby that grew inside her, Evelyn Edwards finally understood everything.