“They have invented their own language,” Doctor Choi tells me. “They have borrowed the Japanese grammar that they learned as children, but using only a very limited range of concepts. Not that they talk a lot, even to each other, and not at all to us, even when we address them in their language.”
Their teenage aggression has subsided somewhat as they’ve grown older. The Neanderthals now submit to haircuts and basic health checks. I witness one such examination of strawberry-blonde Izumi later in the day. She stands, quivering, with the same affronted stoicism that a dog will adopt against the prodding of a vet. They have to be sedated for dental check-ups.
I ask Doctor Choi why she thinks they stopped talking. She gives another of her minimalist grimaces. “It is like a switch was flipped in their brains. They have better results with the Floriensis in Singapore, and those are not much smarter than chimps.
“These?” she gestures towards Izumi, who is baring her teeth at the nurse checking her blood pressure. “They are a dead end.”
NORTH OF LAKE ATHABASCA, ALBERTA, CANADA
“There.”
The truck is an elderly manual-driver. Kip takes both hands off the wheel to point at the same time as she starts grinding down through the truck’s gears. The muscles of her right arm, the thickest I’ve ever seen on a woman, flex as she works the column shift.
Kip is one of the Thalers working and residing in the park. She only superficially resembles the Neanderthals I saw in Tokyo, although she clearly has a lot more of their genetic material than the few per cent that most non-African Sapiens possess. She’s bigger, heftier than a Neanderthal, fair skinned but dark haired, the proportions of her face exotic without being so completely foreign. An idealised version of what we wished our nearest cousins could have been.
Then I look out the window, following the direction of her pointing finger, and I can’t keep my excitement bottled inside. “Mammoths!”
“Hybrids,” she corrects me.
I don’t know enough yet to tell the difference. The two animals wrestling a short distance from the road are noticeably larger than the Asian elephants I’ve seen in zoos, and covered in that distinctive shaggy pelt that sets steppe mammoths apart from most Proboscidea. They have the high shoulders and sloping backs of Asian elephants but more of the lankiness associated with their African cousins. The wool of one of the wrestling animals is noticeably orange, rather than the classical mammoth brown.
“Elephant genes,” says Kip, when I comment on it.
“What are the other differences?”
“Bigger ears, usually.” I hadn’t noticed because the ears looked normal against my childhood memories.
“The mammoths don’t have much to do with the hybrids,” Kip adds. When I ask why not, the corner of her mouth quirks as if at a private joke. “Nothing to talk about,” she says, then adds, “Mammoths don’t get musth, either.” Musth in bull elephants raises testosterone levels by around fifty times and makes them a danger to anything nearby. “These guys do,” Kip continues, “so the mammoths don’t trust them and chase them away.”
We see more animals on the way to the camp, proxy species like modern musk oxen and grey wolves and—once, at a distance—a woolly rhino.
“They weren’t sure about having the rhinos here, originally,” Kip tells me. “In Africa they’ve had problems reintroducing rhinos and elephants together because the young bull elephants kill the rhinos.”
“Not here?”
She shakes her head. “Asian elephant genes don’t seem to carry the same homicidal urges,” she says, drily. “Mammoth genes certainly don’t. There’s a bit of rhino tipping among the mammoths, but no killing.”
“‘Rhino tipping?’”
“Two sisters started it. They taught it to their kids and it’s spread through the population from there. They find a rhino and annoy it until it gets angry enough to charge them, then they wait until the last instant, step aside, grab the rhino with their trunk on the way past and flip it onto its back.”
I’m sure she’s pulling my leg, but, “Woolly rhinos are slow and mammoths are light on their feet,” she says. “We recorded it once. I’ll show you.”
It’s hard to believe they have video like that and it hasn’t gone global. When I say so, Kip gives a shrug that emphasises the heaviness of her shoulders. “We mostly stay off the web.”
The camp is a compact square of prefabricated bungalows, housing laboratories, dormitories, mess and administration facilities. A tiny patch of human geometry jutting up from the spare wilderness all around. The admin block, I learn later, doubles as an armoury. The compound is protected by a ten-foot reinforced fence, watchtowers at its corners. Similar fences close the gaps between the lakes and rivers along the park’s boundaries. Around the camp buildings, the fence looks like the ones that surround refugee camps at home. I asked if they’ve had any problems with poachers.
“Just once,” Kip says. She falls silent. Her lips twitch as though there are more words but she’s not letting them out. “There isn’t the black market for ivory anymore, with the quality of vat-grown stuff now, and all the Pleistocene stuff being dug out of the permafrost—what used to be permafrost.”
I learn later that the poachers were kids from one of the local reservations, trying their hands. They shot at the drone sent to track them and RCAF fired back. The Rangers—some of them men and women from the same community as the poachers—arrived to clean up the pieces.
“The fence is mostly for rhinos and grolars,” Kip says. “The rhinos would just wander in because they’re not paying attention. The bears come looking for food.”
Grizzly–polar bear hybrids, with their jumbled instincts and physiologies, tend to maladaptation in the prototypical habitats of their parent species, I learn while I’m at the camp. In mixed terrain, like that of the park, they dominate.
The population of the camp is both mixed and segregated. The residents are a roughly equal mix of Sapiens and Thaler. There’s also a fluctuating number of non-resident indigenous workers from Fort Chipewyan and the Chipewyan and Cree reservations near the park. The groups muck in together when the work demands it, such as unloading Kip’s supply truck.
I get my first look at the Thaler men in that swarming operation. Most of them are no taller than Kip, who stands as high as my shoulder, but some of them are so heavyset they look almost cubical. Most of the Thalers have blond or red hair. I’m introduced to several, men and women—Doro, Pek, Yellen, Jussy, I’m certain I won’t keep them straight in my head—and experience several minutes of terror, watching their thick hands engulf mine, one after another, while the muscles of their forearms knot like rope as they take their grips. My knuckles survive with only mild crushing.
After the truck is unloaded, the groups part. The Thalers have coffee and lunch with the Cree and Chipewyan workers, or go back to joint tasks with them. They have a shared manner, animated speech followed by reflective pauses before someone else in the group speaks up. The non-indigenous Sapiens keep themselves largely separate, friendly with the others but lacking a common language, a division of scientists and academics versus tradespeople and labourers.
Kip says, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Gnarly.”
The reason there’s a nucleus community of Thalers out here is Professor Joana Almeida Borges—or Gnarly as she’s known here—the first Thaler to complete a university doctorate. For good measure, she did two: in biochemistry and then palaeontology.
Gnarly is the senior researcher here and the project’s driving force. She used to teach at Universidade de Lisboa, in Portugal—where she was born and raised—and later at the University of Toronto. She’s tiny and squat, the top of her head not much higher than Kip’s chin, and her build and features have much more of the pure Neanderthal about them than Kip’s and most of the other Thalers’. Her hair is buttercup-yellow, like Jiro’s. Gnarly is from the first generation, a couple of decades older than Jiro and his companions. When she fixes me with a stare that would sit well on an irritable hawk, I can imagine what a terror she was in the classroom. Her students must have adored her.