Humans

Chapter Twenty-four

The Paleoanthropology Society met each year, alternately in conjunction with the Association of American Archeology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This year, it happened to be the former, and the venue was the Crowne Plaza at Franklin Square.

The format was simple: a single track of programming, consisting of fifteen-minute presentations. There was only occasionally time for questions; John Yellen, the chair of the society, kept things on schedule with Phileas Fogg precision.

After the first day of papers, many of the paleoanthropologists adjourned to the hotel bar. “I’m sure people would love a chance to get to talk to you informally,” said Mary to Ponter, as they stood in the corridor leading to the bar. “Shall we go in?”

Standing solemnly near them was an FBI agent, one of their shadows throughout this trip.

Ponter flared his nostrils. “There are people smoking in that room.”

Mary nodded. “In a lot of jurisdictions, thank God, bars are the only place people can still smoke—and Ottawa and some other places have even outlawed it in bars.”

Ponter frowned. “It is too bad this meeting could not be in Ottawa.”

“I know. If you can’t stand it, we don’t have to go in.”

Ponter considered. “I have had many little ideas for inventions while I have been here, mostly adapting Gliksin technology. But I suspect the one that would make the biggest contribution would be developing nasal filters so that my people will not be constantly assaulted by smells here.”

Mary nodded. “I don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, either. Still…”

“We can go in,” said Ponter.

Mary turned to the FBI agent. “Could you use a drink, Carlos?”

“I’m on duty, ma’am,” he said crisply. “But whatever you and Envoy Boddit want to do is fine by me.”

Mary led the way. The room was dark, with wood-paneled walls. A dozen or so scientists were sitting on stools at the bar, and three small groups were clustered around tables. A TV mounted high on one wall was showing a Seinfeld rerun. Mary recognized it at once: the one where Jerry turns out to be a raving anti-dentite. She was about to head farther into the room when she felt Ponter’s hand on her shoulder. “Is that not the symbol of your people?” he said.

Ponter was pointing with his other hand, and Mary looked where he was indicating: an electric sign was mounted on the wall, advertising Molson Canadian. Ponter couldn’t read the words, she knew, but he’d correctly identified the large red maple leaf. “Ah, yes,” said Mary. “That’s what Canada is most famous for down here. Beer. Fermented grain.”

Ponter blinked. “You must be very proud.”

Mary led the way across the room to one of the small groups sitting in bowl-shaped chairs around a circular table. “Carlos, do you mind?” said Mary, turning to the FBI man.

“I’ll just be over there, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve heard quite enough about fossils for one day.” He moved to the bar, and sat on a stool, but facing them, rather than the bartender.

Mary turned to the table. “May we join you?”

The three seated people—two men and a woman—had been engaged in animated conversation, but they all looked up, and immediately recognized Ponter. “My God, yes,” said one of the men. There was one vacant chair already at the table; he quickly grabbed another.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” said the other man, as Mary and Ponter sat down.

Mary thought about telling part of the truth: no one was smoking at or near this table, and the cluster of chairs was situated in such a way that, even though others might wish to do so, there really wasn’t room for anyone else to join their group—she didn’t want Ponter to be overwhelmed. But she had no intention of telling the other part: that Norman Thierry, the pompous self-styled Neanderthal-DNA expert from UCLA, was sitting across the room. He’d be dying to get at Ponter, but wouldn’t be able to do so.

Instead, Mary simply ignored the question and made introductions. “This is Henry Running Deer,” she said, indicating a Native American man of about forty. “Henry’s at Brown.”

“ Was at Brown,” corrected Henry. “I’ve moved to the University of Chicago.”

“Ah,” said Mary. “And this”—she indicated the woman, who was white and perhaps thirty-five—“is Angela Bromley, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.”

Angela extended her right hand. “It’s a real pleasure, Dr. Boddit.”

“Ponter,” said Ponter, who had come to understand that in this society one should not use another’s first name until invited to do so.

Angela continued. “And this is my husband, Dieter.”

“Hello,” said Mary and Ponter simultaneously. And, “Are you an anthropologist, too?” asked Mary.

“No, no, no,” said Dieter. “I’m in aluminum siding.”

Ponter tipped his head. “You hide it well.”

The others looked perplexed, but Mary laughed. “You’ll get used to Ponter’s sense of humor,” she said.

Dieter got up. “Let me get you two something to drink. Mary—wine?”

“White wine, yes.”

“And Ponter?”

Ponter frowned, clearly not knowing what to ask for. Mary leaned close to him. “Bars always have Coke,” she said.

“Coke!” said Ponter, with delight. “Yes, please.”

Dieter disappeared. Mary helped herself to some of the Bits & Bites sitting in a small wooden bowl on the round table.

“So,” said Angela, to Ponter, “I hope you don’t mind some questions. You’ve been turning our field upside down, you know.”

“That was not my intention,” said Ponter.

“Of course not,” said Angela. “But everything we hear about your world challenges something we thought we knew.”

“For instance?” asked Ponter.

“Well, it’s said that your people don’t practice agriculture.”

“True,” said Ponter.

“We’d always assumed that agriculture was a prerequisite of advanced civilization,” said Angela, taking a sip of whatever mixed drink she was having.

“Why?” asked Ponter.

“Well,” said Angela, “see, we thought that only through agriculture could you be guaranteed a secure food supply. That allows people to specialize in other jobs—teacher, engineer, government worker, and so on.”

Ponter shook his head slowly back and forth, as if he were stunned by what he was hearing. “We have people on my world who choose to live according to the ancient ways. How long do you think it takes one of them to provide sustenance for itself”—Ponter’s language had a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, Mary knew; this was Hak’s attempt to render it—“and its dependents?”

Angela lifted her shoulders a little. “A lot, I presume.”

“No,” said Ponter, “it does not—not as long as you keep your number of dependents low. It takes about nine percent of one’s time.” He paused, either calculating for himself or listening to Hak provide a conversion. “About sixty of your hours a month.”

“Sixty hours a month,” repeated Angela. “That’s—my God—that’s just fifteen hours a week.”

“A week is a cluster of seven days?” asked Ponter, looking at Mary. She nodded. “Yes, then, that is right,” Ponter said. “All the rest of one’s time can be devoted to other activities. From the beginning, we have had much surplus time.”

“Ponter’s right,” said Henry Running Deer. “Fifteen hours per week is the average work load today for hunter-gatherers on this Earth, too.”

“Really?” said Angela, setting down her glass.

Henry nodded. “Agriculture was the first human activity for which rewards were directly proportional to effort. If you worked eighty hours a week plowing fields, your yield was twice as much as if you worked forty. Hunting and gathering isn’t like that: if you hunt full-time, you’ll kill off all the prey in your territory; it’s actually counterproductive to work too hard as a hunter.”

Dieter returned, placing glasses in front of Mary and Ponter, then sitting back down.

“But how do you get permanent settlement without agriculture?” asked Angela.

Henry frowned. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s not agriculture that gives rise to permanent habitation. It’s hunting and gathering.”

“But—no, no. I remember from school—”

“And how many Native Americans taught at your school?” asked Henry Running Deer in an icy tone.

“None, but—”

Henry looked at Ponter, then back at Mary. “Whites rarely understand this point, but it’s absolutely true. Hunter-gatherers stay put. To live off the land requires knowing it intimately: which plants grow where, where the big animals come to drink, where the birds lay their eggs. It takes a lifetime to really know a territory. To move somewhere else is to throw out all that hard-won knowledge.”

Mary lifted her eyebrows. “But farmers need to put down roots—umm, so to speak.”

Henry didn’t acknowledge the pun. “Actually, farmers are itinerant over a period of generations. Hunter-gatherers keep their family sizes small; after all, extra mouths to feed increase the work that an adult has to do. But farmers want big families: each child is another laborer to send out into the fields, and the more kids you have, the less work you have to do yourself.”

Ponter was listening with interest; his translator bleeped softly now and again, but he seemed to be following along.

“I guess that makes sense,” Angela said, but her voice sounded dubious.

“It does,” said Henry. “But as the farmers’ offspring grow up, they have to move on and start their own farms. Ask a farmer where his great-great-grandfather lived, and he’ll name some place far away; ask a hunter-gatherer, and he’ll say ‘right here.’”

Mary thought about her own parents, living in Calgary; her grandparents in England and Ireland and Wales, and—God, she didn’t have a clue where her great-grandparents had been from, let alone her great-great-grandparents.

“A territory isn’t something you abandon lightly,” continued Henry. “That’s why hunter-gatherers value the elderly so much.”

Mary still stung from Ponter thinking her foolish for dyeing her hair. “Tell me about that,” she said.

Henry took a sip of his beer, then: “Farmers, they value the young, because farming is a business of brute strength. But hunting and gathering are based on knowledge. The more years you can remember back, the more you see the patterns, the more you know the territory.”

“We do value our elders,” said Ponter. “There is no substitute for wisdom.”

Mary nodded. “We actually knew that about Neanderthals,” she said, “based on the fossil record here. But I didn’t understand why.”

“I’m an Australopithecus specialist,” said Angela. “What fossils are you referring to?”

“Well,” said Mary, “the specimen known as La-Chapelle-aux-Saints had paralysis and arthritis, and a broken jaw, and most of his teeth were gone. He had obviously been looked after for years; there was no way he could have fended for himself. Indeed, someone probably had to pre-chew his food for him. But La Chapelle was forty when he died—ancient by the standards of a people who usually lived only into their twenties. What a storehouse of knowledge he must have had about his tribe’s territory! Decades of experience! Same thing with Shanidar I, from Iraq. That poor fellow was also forty or so, and was in even worse shape than La Chapelle; blind in his left eye and missing his right arm.”

Henry whistled a few notes. It took Mary a second, but she did recognize them: the theme from The Six Million Dollar Man. She smiled and went on. “He, too, was looked after, not out of some sense of charity, but because a person that old was a fount of hunting knowledge.”

“That may be,” said Angela, sounding a bit defensive, “but, still, it was farmers who built cities, farmers who had technology. In Europe, in Egypt—places where people farmed—there’ve been cities for thousands of years.”

Henry Running Deer looked at Ponter, as if appealing for support. Ponter just tipped his head, passing the floor back to the Native American. “You think Europeans had technology—metallurgy and all that—and we Natives didn’t because of some inherent superiority?” asked Henry. “Is that what you think?”

“No, no,” said poor Angela. “Of course not. But…”

“Europeans had that sort of technology purely by the luck of the draw. Collectible ores right on the surface; flints for making stone tools. You ever tried chipping granite, which is mostly what we’ve got here? It makes lousy arrowheads.”

Mary hoped Angela would just let it go, but she didn’t. “It wasn’t just tools that the Europeans had. They also were clever enough to domesticate animals—beasts of burden to work for them. Native Americans never domesticated any of the animals here.”

“They didn’t domesticate them because they couldn’t,” said Henry. “There are just fourteen large domesticable herbivores on this entire planet, and only one of those—the reindeer—is naturally found in North America, and it only in the far north. The five major domesticates are all Eurasian in origin: sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and pigs. The other nine are minor players, like camels—geographically isolated. You can’t domesticate the North American megafauna—moose or bear or deer or bison or mountain lion. They simply aren’t temperamentally suited to it. Oh, you can perhaps capture them in the wild, but you can’t rear them, and they won’t take riders no matter how hard you try to break them.” Henry’s voice grew cold as he went on. “It wasn’t superior intelligence that led to Europeans having what they did. In fact, you could argue that we Natives here in North America showed more brains by surviving and thriving in the absence of metals and domesticable herbivores.”

“But there were some Indians—I’m sorry, some Natives—who farmed,” said Angela.

“Sure. But what did they farm? Corn, mostly—because that was what was here. And corn is very low in protein, compared to the cereal grains that all came from Eurasia.”

Angela looked now at Ponter. “But—but Neanderthals: they originated in Europe, not North America.”

Henry nodded. “And they had great stone tools: the Mousterian Industry.”

“But they didn’t domesticate animals, even though you said there were plenty in Europe that could have been. And they didn’t farm.”

“Hello!” said Henry. “Earth to Angela! No one domesticated animals when the Neanderthals lived on this Earth. And no one farmed then—not Ponter’s ancestors, and not yours or mine. Farming began in the Fertile Crescent 10,500 years ago. That was long after the Neanderthals had died out—at least, in this time line. Who knows what they would have done had they survived?”

“I do,” said Ponter, simply.

Mary laughed.

“All right,” said Henry. “Then tell us. Your people never developed agriculture, right?”

“That is right,” said Ponter.

Henry nodded. “You’re probably better off without farming, anyway. A lot of bad stuff goes along with agriculture.”

“Like what?” said Mary, being careful, now that Henry had apparently calmed down a bit, to have her voice convey curiosity rather than a challenge.

“Well,” said Henry, “I already alluded to overpopulation. And the effect on the land is obvious: forests are chopped down to make farmland. Plus, of course, there are the diseases that come from domesticated animals.”

Mary saw that Ponter was nodding. Reuben Montego had explained that to them back in Sudbury.

Dieter—who turned out to be pretty sharp for an aluminum siding guy—nodded. “And there’s more to it than just physical diseases; there are cultural diseases. Slavery, for instance: that’s a direct product of agriculture’s need for labor.”

Mary looked at Ponter, feeling uncomfortable. That was the second reference to slavery Ponter had heard here in Washington. Mary knew she had some ’splaining to d o…

“That’s right,” said Henry. “Most slaves were plantation workers. And even when you don’t have literal slavery, agriculture gives rise to what amounts to the same thing: share cropping, peonage, and so on. Not to mention the class-based society, feudalism, landowners, and all that; they’re all directly a product of agriculture.”

Angela shifted in her chair. “But even when it came to hunting, the archeological record showed our ancestors were much better at it than were the Neanderthals,” she said.

Ponter had looked lost during the discussion of agriculture and feudalism. But he had clearly understood Angela’s last statement. “In what way?” he asked.

“Well,” said Angela, “we don’t see any evidence of efficiency in your ancestors’ approach to hunting.”

Ponter frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Neanderthals only killed animals one at a time.” As soon as the words were out, Angela clearly realized she’d made a mistake.

Ponter’s eyebrow went up. “How did your ancestors hunt?”

Angela looked uncomfortable. “Well, um…what we used to do, was, well, we used to drive whole herds of animals off cliffs, killing hundreds at once.”

Ponter’s golden eyes were wide. “But—but that is so…so profligate,” he said. “Surely even your large populations could not make use of all that meat. And, besides, it seems cowardly to kill like that.”

“I—I don’t know that I’d put it that way,” said Angela, reddening. “I mean, we think of it as foolhardy to put yourself at unnecessary risk, so—”

“You jump out of airplanes,” said Ponter. “You dive off cliffs. You turn punching and hitting into an organized sport. I have seen this all on television.”

“We don’t all do those things,” said Mary, gently.

“All right, then,” said Ponter. “But in addition to hazardous sports, I have seen other behaviors that are common. He gestured toward the bar. “Smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, both of which I am given to understand are dangerous, and”—he nodded at Henry—“both of which, incidentally, are products of agriculture. Surely those activities qualify as ‘unnecessary risks.’ How can you kill animals in such a cowardly fashion, but then take such risks as—oh, oh, wait. I see. I think I see.”

“What?” said Mary.

“Yes, what?” asked Henry.

“Give me a moment,” said Ponter, clearly pursuing an elusive thought. A few seconds later, he nodded, having captured what he was after. “You Gliksins drink alcohol, smoke, and engage in hazardous sports to demonstrate your residual capacity. You are saying to those around you, see, here, during flush times, I can run myself down substantially, and still function well, thereby proving to prospective mates that I am not currently operating at the peak of my abilities. Therefore, in lean times, I will obviously have the excess strength and endurance to still be a good provider.”

“Really?” said Mary. “What a fascinating notion!”

“I understand it, because my kind does the same thing—but in other ways. When we hunt—”

Mary got it in a flash. “When hunting,” she said, “you don’t take the easy way out. You don’t drive animals off cliffs, or throw spears at them from a safe distance—something my ancestors did, but yours did not, at least on this version of Earth. No, here your people engaged in close-quarters attacks on prey animals, fighting them one-on-one, and thrusting spears into them by hand. I guess it is the same thing as smoking and drinking: look, honey, I can bring down supper with my bare hands, so if things get tough, and I have to hunt in safer ways, you can be sure I’ll still bring home the bacon.”

“Exactly,” said Ponter.

Mary nodded. “It makes sense.” She gestured at a thin man sitting on the opposite side of the bar. “Erik Trinkaus, there, found that many Neanderthal fossils showed the same sort of upper-body injuries we find in modern rodeo riders, as if they’d been bucked by animals, presumably while in close combat with them.”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” said Ponter. “I have been thrown by a mammoth now and again, and—”

“You’ve what?” said Henry.

“Been thrown by a mammoth…”

“A mammoth?” repeated Angela, agog.

Mary grinned. “I can see we’re going to be here a while. Let me get everyone another round…”