Of Ants and Dinosaurs

4 Tablets

Tablets were as vital to the dinosaur world as the paper on which we write. They came in two types: stationary and movable. Also called ‘wordhills’ or ‘wordstones’, station­ary tablets (which we might also, rather pleasingly, term ‘dinosaur stationery’), were hills with a relatively even slope, gentle cliff faces or enormous rocks with smooth surfaces, on which the dinosaurs carved their super-sized words. Movable tablets could be made from many differ­ent materials, but wood, stone and leather were the most common. Because the dinosaurs did not yet use metal, let alone saws, they were unable to manufacture wooden boards; instead, they used their megalithic stone hatchets to cleave tree-trunks in two, lengthwise down the middle, and they then carved characters into the cross-section of one-half of them. Their stone tablets were flat slabs with facades soft enough for engraving; these came in all shapes and sizes, but the smallest would have been at least as big as one of our family dining-tables. Leather tablets were made from animal hides or lizard skins, and characters were drawn on them in plant- or mineral-based paint; often a single tablet required that many skins be joined together.

The dinosaurs’ thick, clumsy fingers made it impossible for them to grip small implements for carving or writing, and they lacked the dexterity needed to form small characters. As a result, the characters they produced were very large: the smallest they could manage were still the size of a football. This meant that their tablets were by necessity huge and unwieldy, and even then they could fit only a few characters on each one.

Tablets were usually held communally by a dinosaur tribe or settlement and were used to keep simple records of collective property, membership, economic output, and births and deaths. A tribe of 1,000 dinosaurs would need twenty to thirty sizeable trees for a register of its members, and the minutes from one meeting might require over a hundred hides. As a result, the manufacture of tablets placed a significant strain on the dinosaurs’ resources, and furthermore, when tribes or settlements relocated (a frequent occurrence during the Hunting Era), transporting libraries of tablets proved an even greater burden. For this reason, although dinosaur society had possessed a written language for 1,000 years, its cultural development was painfully slow and had nearly come to a standstill in recent centuries. Their script had remained extremely crude. With only simple, unary numerals and a handful of pictographs, it lagged far behind the sophistication of their spoken language. The sluggish emergence of writing had become the biggest obstacle to scientific and cultural progress in the dinosaur world, one which had arrested dinosaur society in a primitive state for a long time. It was a textbook example of how a species’ ill-shaped hands could hinder its evolution.

The dinosaur Kunda was one of a hundred or so scribes in Boulder City. In the dinosaur world, the job of a scribe fell somewhere between that of the modern-day occupations of typist and printer. Scribes were chiefly responsible for copying tablets by hand. On the day in question, Kunda and twenty other scribes were working in front of a mountain of tablets, making a copy of the register of Boulder City’s residents for safekeeping. Most of the original register had been recorded on wooden tablets. Hundreds of split tree-trunks were stacked in hill-height piles, giving Kunda’s workplace the appearance of one of our timber yards.

Kunda, a blunt stone knife gripped in his left claw and one of those humongous stone hammers in his right, was transcribing the pictograms from a ten-metre-long wooden tablet onto two new, shorter tablets. He had been at this dull, draining work for days and days, but still the inselberg of blank trunks in front of him didn’t seem to have got any smaller. Hurling down the stone knife and hammer, he rubbed his weary eyes, leant back against a stack of tablets and heaved a deep sigh, feeling very dispirited about his tedious life.

Just then, a squadron of 1,000 ants paraded past on the ground before him – on their way back from surgery, Kunda presumed. A sudden inspiration seized him. He stood up, picked out two dried strips of glow-lizard jerky and waved them at the colony. Glow-lizards were so called because they emitted a fluorescent light at night, and their meat was a favourite with ants. No surprise then that the ant squadron immediately changed its direction of travel and veered towards him.

Kunda pointed first to the tablet he was copying from, then to the one he was working on – which, depressingly, he’d so far inscribed with a mere two-and-a-half characters – and then to the ants. The ants grasped his meaning at once. They surged onto the smooth white face of the partially completed tablet and began to carve the remaining characters into the wood with their mandibles. Kunda, meanwhile, eased himself back against the stack of tablets, feeling rather smug. The ants would take much longer to finish the task than he would, but their patience and tenacity was immeasurably superior to that of any other creature and they would get it done eventually. In the meantime, he could kick back and relax for a spell.

He dozed off. In his dream he saw himself at the helm of a mighty army of more than a million ants, enthusiastically urging on his troops. The army swarmed over hundreds of blank tablets and like a black tide turned every one of them dark; before long, the tide withdrew, revealing a vast collection of tablets whose white surfaces now bore neat lines of orderly characters carved into them.

A series of slight pricks on Kunda’s lower leg roused him from sleep and when he raised his head he saw that several ants were gnawing at his left ankle. This was their customary way of getting a dinosaur’s attention. Seeing that he was awake, the ants gestured at the tablet with their antennae, to indicate the job was done. Kunda glanced up at the sun and realised that very little time had passed. He then looked at the tablet and promptly lost his temper. The ants had completed the half-written character at full size, but all the other characters they’d carved were many times smaller. It looked ridiculous – like a tiny tail trailing after the three large characters. Such shoddy work wasn’t just inadequate, it had ruined a whole tablet.

Kunda had known all along that the ants were crafty little mercenaries, and now he had proof. He raised a broom to mete out the punishment they deserved. But just as he was about to strike, he caught another glimpse of their wooden tablet and a sudden revelation flashed through his mind. The characters the ants had carved were small, but they were fully legible to dinosaur eyes. The reason characters were normally so big was not for ease of reading but because the dinosaurs were not dexterous enough to inscribe anything smaller. It occurred to him that the ants, who were twitching their antennae frantically in his direction, might very well be trying to explain this to him.

The scowl on his face broadened into a smile and he dropped the broom. Then he set down one of the strips of glow-lizard jerky in the middle of the colony and swished the other tantalisingly. Crouching down in front of the tablet, he gestured at the three large characters and the line of small characters and tried to communicate his idea. It took the ants a while to catch on, but eventually they waggled their feelers in emphatic confirmation: yes, they could carve characters that were smaller still. Immediately, they flooded onto the blank part of the tablet and set to work. Soon they had carved a line of even smaller characters, each about the size of the letters in the title on this book’s cover. As the ants were illiterate, they were simply reproducing the shapes of the characters.

Kunda rewarded them with the remaining strip of jerky. Then he hacked off the section of the tablet carved with the smallest characters, tucked it under his arm and gleefully lolloped off to see the city prefect.

Because of Kunda’s low status, the guards stopped him on the steps of the colossal stone mansion that housed the prefect’s office. The guards were imposing, powerfully built dinosaurs and Kunda quickly lifted up the section of the tablet for them to see. They inspected it. Within moments, their expressions had morphed from surprise to awe; it was as if they were in the presence of a sacred relic. Turning their gaze back to Kunda, they gaped at him for a long time, as though he were a great sage, then let him pass.

‘What’s that you’ve got there – a toothpick?’ the prefect asked when he saw Kunda.

‘No, sir, this is a tablet.’

‘A tablet? Are you an idiot? You couldn’t fit half a character onto that piddly piece of wood.’

‘It’s hard to believe, I know, sir, but there are actually more than thirty characters on this self-same piddly piece of wood.’ Kunda passed it over.

The prefect gazed at the tablet with the same wonderment as the guards. After a long time, he looked up at Kunda. ‘I don’t suppose you carved this yourself?’

‘Of course not, sir. A gang of ants did it.’

Boulder City’s municipal officials gathered round and the tablet was passed from claws to claws, much like we might hand round an ivory figurine to be admired. These dinosaurs constituted the city’s ruling class and they now launched into fervent discussion.

‘Incredible – such tiny characters…’

‘… and totally legible too.’

‘Over the millennia, so many of our ancestors have tried to write like this, but to no avail.’

‘Those itsy-bitsy bugs really are quite capable.’

‘We should have known they’d be good for more than medical care.’

‘Just think of all the materials we’ll save…’

‘… and how easily we’ll be able to transport our tablets. You know, I might be able to carry the entire register of the city’s residents by myself! No need to employ a hundred-strong division of dinosaur movers any more.’

‘And that’s just the start of it, I’d say. We can now consider changing the materials we use for the tablets too.’

‘Quite so. After all, where’s the merit in using tree-trunks? For characters this small, bark would surely be lighter and more portable.’

‘Precisely. And a lot cheaper too. Small lizard skins could be used as well.’

The prefect interrupted the chatter with a wave. ‘Right then, from now on the ants will be our scribes. We shall start by raising a writing force of a million ants or more. Let’s see…’ He surveyed the room, his eyes finally falling on Kunda. ‘You will lead this campaign.’

So Kunda realised his dream, and Boulder City, along with the rest of the dinosaur world, saved a great deal of wood and stone and an enormous quantity of hides. But compared with the real significance of this event in the history of Cretaceous civilisation, those savings were trivialities.

The advent of fine antprint made it possible to transcribe vast volumes of information, and at the same time the dinosaurs’ script grew richer and more sophisticated. At long last, the alpha and omega of the dinosaurs’ experience and knowledge could be fully and systematically recorded using the written word and mathematical equations. It could also be disseminated far more widely, reliably and permanently, no longer subject to the vagaries of dinosaur memory and oral tradition. This remarkable advancement gave fresh impetus to Cretaceous science and culture, sending the long-stagnant Cretaceous civilisation into a period of whirlwind development.

Meanwhile, new applications for the ants’ fine-motor skills were found in all sectors of the dinosaur world. Take timekeeping technology as an example. Dinosaurs had invented the sundial long ago, but because they used large tree-trunks as gnomons and drew rough hour lines around them, these had to remain fixed in place. Thanks to the ants, sundials could now be made smaller and the hour lines rendered more precisely, allowing dinosaurs to carry them around. Later, dinosaurs would invent the hourglass and the water clock, and though they might have been able to make the containers themselves, only ants could bore the crucial holes. The manufacture of mechanical clocks was even more dependent on ant labour, for though a grandfather clock might be taller than a dinosaur, it still contained numerous tiny parts that could only be machined by ants.

But the area in which the ants’ skills made the most meaningful contribution to the advancement of civilisation, besides writing, was scientific experimentation. Thanks to the ants’ capacity for intricate work, it was now possible to take measurements with an exactitude that had eluded dinosaurs, allowing a shift in experimentation from the qualitative to the quantitative. Research once thought impossible became a reality, leading to rapid strides in Cretaceous science.

Ants were now an integral part of the dinosaur world. Dinosaurs of high standing were never without a miniature ant nest. Most of these nests resembled a wooden sphere and housed several hundred ants. When a dinosaur needed to write, it would unfold a strip of bark or hide parchment on the table and set down its ant nest beside it. The ants would scurry out onto the parchment and etch the words dictated to them by the dinosaur. They used a very particular system of concurrent writing, quite different from our own. Where we humans write one character at a time, the ants teamed up and inscribed multiple characters simultaneously. This allowed them to complete a transcription very rapidly, at a pace that would far outstrip our own handwriting speed. Naturally, a dinosaur’s pocket-sized ant nest also came in handy for all sorts of other tasks that required a light touch.

For their part, the ants received much more than just bones and meat from the dinosaurs. After their new collaboration began, the first invaluable asset the ant world gained was written language. Ants had never had a written language before, and even as they became the dinosaurs’ scribes, they remained illiterate, which meant they were limited to simple reproduction work, copying out the characters from the dinosaurs’ outsized tablets. Their efficiency was relatively poor, as they could only transcribe one stroke at a time. But the dinosaurs were in dire need of ants who could take dictation like secretaries, and the ants, who were well aware of the importance of written language to society, were eager to learn. Thanks to a concerted effort on both sides, the ants quickly mastered the dinosaurs’ script and co-opted it for use in their own society.

For Cretaceous civilisation, this was of immeasurable significance because it forged a bridge between their respective worlds. Over time, the ants came to understand dinosaur speech, but dinosaur anatomy meant that dinosaurs would never be able to understand the ants’ pheromone-based language. Consequently, only simple exchanges took place between the two worlds. But the ants’ mastery of written language brought about a fundamental change in this, for the ants could now communicate with the dinosaurs through writing. To facilitate this, they invented an astounding new method. Within a square patch of ground, thousands of ants would quickly arrange themselves to form lines of text. This drill composition technique grew more polished by the day. Eventually, the transition between drill formations was so swift that the block of ants resembled the instantaneous output of a computer screen.

As communication between the two worlds improved, the ants absorbed more and more knowledge and ideas from the dinosaurs, for each new scientific and cultural achievement could now be promptly disseminated throughout antkind. And so the critical defect in ant society – the dearth of creative thinking – was remedied, leading to the simultaneous rapid advancement of ant civilisation. The result of the dinosaur–ant alliance was that the ants became the dinosaurs’ dexterous hands, while the dinosaurs became a wellspring of vision and innovation for the ants. The fusion of these two budding intelligences in the late Cretaceous had finally sparked a dramatic nuclear reaction. The sun of civilisation rose over the heart of Gondwana, dispelling the long night of evolution on Earth.