by Anthology
“You say language,” said Uncle Arturo. “Is it a genuine language?”
“It depends what you mean by genuine. Any linguist could invent a primitive language, but Els has a fluency that would only come with years of use. Do we know anything about her?”
My uncle glanced to Tormes and Marella.
“Els is just a feral girl with a severely deformed skull,” said Tormes. “Perhaps she was abandoned in the mountains while very young, and animals reared her.”
“Animals could never have taught her such a language,” I replied. “Animals don’t have fire, either.”
They glanced uncomfortably at each other, but volunteered no more information.
We let Els spend the night by herself, then at dawn the three orderlies were sent in to seize her. Moments later I entered the garden, loaded with more firewood and meat, and armed with a sharpened curtain rod. I made a show of driving off the orderlies after an extended bout of shouting, and fortunately Els did not seem to have any concept of acting. I was treated like a genuine hero as we settled down to another day together. While we talked Els began to make stone knives and scrapers out of the garden’s ornamental pebbles. She even charred the end of my curtain rod in the fire and scraped it into a lethal-looking, fire-hardened point. Again I left her at sunset and went through a long debriefing with my uncle, Marella and Tormes.
“If Els was raised by wild sheep or rabbits, how did she learn to make stone tools and fire-hardened spear points?” I asked with undisguised sarcasm.
“We are as puzzled as you,” replied Tormes calmly.
On the morning of the third day I returned with a newly slaughtered sheep. Els skinned and butchered it with great skill, using her newly made stone knives and scrapers. It was only now that Els actually approached me. Coming around to my side of the fire, she rubbed mutton fat through my hair, then pinned it back with seagull feathers. By now I had learned to say “Di,” which seemed to cover both thanks and sorry. Over the next half hour, she made me understand that although I was skinny, she thought I was very brave to go hunting at night.
At the debriefing on the fifth day I had an audience of a dozen people, two of whom I recognized from the Department of Anthropology in the university in Madrid. It took only a minute to walk the tens of thousands of years from the garden to the committee room.
“I now have over a hundred words,” I reported. “I can communicate with Els fairly well, and she has answered a few questions. She talks about a tribe. They call themselves the Rhuun, and they have always lived here.”
“What?” exclaimed Tormes. “Impossible.”
“I’m only telling you what Els said. They have a detailed calendar, and a counting system based on the number twenty.”
“Ten fingers and ten toes,” said Marella.
“Did she do your hair?” asked one of the new observers.
“Yes. Grooming seems to be a bonding ritual for the Rhuun, and possibly a precursor to sexual activity as well,” I explained.
“So she made a pass at you,” laughed my uncle. Nobody else laughed.
“She has been removed from her tribe for the first time in her life,” I added.
“Then you are her new provider,” said Tormes. “She may be feeling insecure because you are not mating with her.”
This time a few snickers rippled around the table.
“Look, this was not in the job description,” I said to my uncle, scowling.
“Besides, she might be disappointed,” he replied, and this time everyone really did laugh.
“From now on you will return to her after a couple of hours each night, and pretend you were lucky with your hunting,” Tormes hurriedly advised, seeing the expression on my face. “Just having you nearby at night should gain her trust.”
“But seriously, stay on your own side of the fire,” advised my uncle. “Technically she’s is a ward of the state, and probably a minor.”
When the meeting broke up Marella and Tormes invited me to join them for a coffee before I returned to Els. Wearing my long coat over jeans and a T-shirt, but with my hair still greased and pinned back with seagull feathers, I felt quite out of place. The café was over the road from the clinic, and was about as sterile. Most people think of Cadiz as a pretty little port with more history than some countries, but this was Puerto Real, the messy industrial fringe of the holiday city that visitors barely notice as they drive through. Whatever the setting, it was my first filtered coffee for many days and I was very grateful for it. I also ordered a large salad. A man named Garces joined us, but he said little at first.
“There’s more to Els than you think,” said Tormes after I ordered another cup.
“You underestimate me,” I replied.
“What do you think?”
“Had they not been extinct for thirty thousand years, I’d say she was neanderthal. Even her stone tools look very like what I’ve seen in museums.”
“Not neanderthal,” said Marella.
“Sorry?”
“Els’s tools are relatively primitive, more like those of the neanderthals’ ancestor species, homo heidelbergensis,” Tormes explained.
“I don’t know much about paleo-anthropology,” I said, although I knew that half a dozen species of hominids have lived in Spain over the past two million years.
“The heidelbergensians were around for six hundred thousand years,” said Tormes, as if he was speaking for a television documentary. “They were the first hominids to use advanced technology like clothing, artificial shelters and probably language. There is a cave in the north called the Pit of Bones where they even ritually disposed of their dead. They lived in an ice-age environment that would have killed any hominid that did not use clothing. They were once the brightest people ever, and they had the most advanced technology on Earth for longer than homo sapiens has existed. Their cranial capacity actually overlapped with the modern human average, but they were also phenomenally strong.”
I had by now noticed that Els could break branches that were way beyond my strength. Perhaps there was more to this than a hoax.
“You talk as if Els is a real cave girl,” I said casually.
“She is,” said Garces.
At this point a waiter arrived with my second coffee. I took a few sips while the waiter cleaned up and removed some cups and dishes. My mind was screaming that Garces was mad, yet he lacked the manic enthusiasm of genuine nutcases. He almost looked unhappy. The waiter left, skilfully balancing a pile of plates and cups on one arm.
“The girl’s DNA is not human,” Garces continued. “True, it has more in common with human DNA than that of an ape, but there are not enough base pairs in common with human DNA for her to interbreed with, say, yourself.”
“Take that back!” I snapped, already near my limit with this onslaught of weirdness.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said at once. “I have been rather unsettled by all this, and . . .” He scratched his head. “Look, what I have found is impossible, but I have done my tests in good faith. The base pair comparisons that I ran give Els’s DNA more in common with that of neanderthals than homo sapiens, but examination of DNA mutation sites and rates suggests that she could be from the neanderthals’ ancestral species.”
“There was also semen found on a vaginal swab,” said Tormes.
“Indeed!” said Garces. “Its DNA was of the same species. Els’s husband, lover or whatever is another heidelbergensian. He is also a blood relative, from perhaps three generations back, but this is not unknown in small and isolated tribes.”
There was silence as I sipped my coffee. Almost before I knew it, my cup was empty. I was expected to say something, apparently.
“Genetic engineering was around in the early 1990s, when Els would have been born,” I suggested, seriously out of my depth and well aware of it.
“Balls,” replied Garces wearily, as if he had heard the suggestion too many times over the past few days. “That’s like saying that Nazi Germany put men
in space, just because they had primitive rockets. Even today we can’t engineer genetic changes on the scale found in the subject’s DNA.”
“Her name is Els,” I insisted.
“Yes, yes, Els. Whatever her name, she—”
“She’s the victim of some cruel genetic hoax!” I began angrily.
“Haven’t you been listening?” Garces demanded, banging his fists on the table.
“Yes, and to get back to your analogy, the Nazis flew at least two types of manned rocket, and they drew up designs for manned spacecraft as well. I saw a documentary on television, the Nazis put rockets into space big enough to carry a man—”
“All right, all right, Nazis in space is a bad analogy,” he conceded, waving his hands. “The point is that we have never had the skills to make the massive changes to human DNA that I have observed in, er, Els. Yes, we could fool about with bits and pieces of the genome and clone the occasional sheep in the 1990s, but not create a new race—or should I say re-create an old one.”
“But Els is a fact,” I insisted. “Genetics only proves—”
“This isn’t just genetics!” said Garces sharply. “Els has stepped straight out of the Middle Pleistocene! She has practically no radioactive contaminants in her tissues from bomb nuclear tests or the Chernobyl fallout. Her levels of industrial contaminants like dioxin also suggest that she had been eating food grown in this century for only two weeks.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
“Els and her tribe are genuine,” said Marella. “That girl in the clinic across the road is an ice-age hominid; she is from the ice age.”
That was a conversation stopper, if ever there was one. For a time we sat staring at each other, saying nothing. The waiter returned. We all ordered more coffee.
“Are you willing to put that in a press release?” I asked once we were alone again.
“Young man, if I had been unfaithful to my husband I would not want it in a press release, whether it was true or not,” interjected Marella, almost in a snarl. “Not unless it was a matter of life and death, anyway. Before we all go making fools of ourselves with public statements, we need to know Els’s side of the story.”
Tormes looked particularly uncomfortable, and Garces squirmed. Marella glared at me until I stared down at the table. She was clearly used to taking no nonsense from any man, whether plumber or prime minister.
“All their pelt cloaks are new sheepskin, and their scrapers are new,” said Tormes. “Their spears have been cut from modern hawthorn stands.”
“You mean you have evidence of a whole tribe?” I exclaimed.
Yet again there was silence. Tormes had said too much in the heat of the moment.
“I think we have said enough,” suggested Marella coldly. “Carlos, what do you have to say about Els—as a linguist?”
I was annoyed but cautious. The body language displayed by Tormes and Garces suggested that they were treating Marella very carefully. Her face was familiar, in a way that a face glimpsed countless times on television might be.
“Five days is not enough for a truly informed assessment,” I explained first. “Els’s language is primitive yet highly functional. It’s adequate to coordinate a hunting party, pass on tool-making skills, and so on. She actually has a word for ‘ice’, even though there is no naturally occurring ice in the area—”
“That’s significant,” exclaimed Marella. “She may remember an ice age. Did she talk about bright lights in the sky, or flying things? Strange men with god-like powers?”
“No. She has no concept of gods and spirits. She doesn’t even have words to describe what she’s seen here in Puerto Real over the past five days.”
“We must teach her Spanish,” said Marella.
“No!” cried Tormes firmly. “She is our only window on Middle Pleistocene culture; she must not be contaminated. She will be kept with you, Carlos, well away from the rest of us.”
“My marriage and reputation are at stake!” exclaimed Marella.
“Marella, Els is bigger than—”
“And your position at the university is certainly at stake,” Marella warned.
“What else do you have to tell us, Carlos?” asked Garces hurriedly.
“Well, nearly a third of Rhuun words are devoted to arithmetic, their calendar, the seasons and the passage of time. Els can understand and name numbers up to a hundred thousand, and she even understands the concept of zero.”
“So?” asked Marella impatiently.
“Zero is a very advanced concept, it has only been around for a few centuries,” I explained.
“On this world, anyway,” said Marella. “The rest of you may be too frightened to talk about aliens, but I am not.”
Within minutes I was back in the Middle Pleistocene, dumping another dead sheep beside the fire. I had been bringing in the firewood wrapped in blankets belonging to the clinic, and I now found Els had made a simple, tent-like shelter from them. The heidelbergensians had invented artificial shelters, Tormes had said. I fed a few branches into the fire, then lay down beside it, wrapped in a spare blanket. Looking up at the stars, I recalled that I had not slept in the open since a school camp five years ago. Although I did windsurfing and rode a scooter, I am not the outdoors type and I prefer to sleep under a roof.
I gave a start as a hand touched my shoulder. Els! She moved as silently as a cat on carpet. Settling beside me, she said “Crrun.” The word meant something like fellow hunter, tribesman, and family member all in one, but this time her intonation was softer, almost a purr. Perhaps the Rhuun also stretched it to cover sweetheart and lover.
Aware that a video camera was recording everything, I gestured to the space between me and the fire. Els lay down, staring anxiously at me. Perhaps she was terrified that I had not mated with her because I was planning to abandon her. Only a few metres away a dozen anthropologists were gathered around a video screen, and were probably laughing. Els began to draw up the hem of her cloak. I seized her hand hurriedly.
“Els, Carr, crrun,” I assured her, then added that I was tired from a difficult hunt.
The words transformed her. Frightening and dangerous this place might be, yet a male had now declared crrun with her, whatever that really meant. I was also a good hunter, and I liked to talk. After staring up at the stars for a while and reciting something too fast for me to follow, she eventually pulled my arm over her, pressed my hand against her breast and went to sleep.
The next morning Els began to make me a cloak out of the sheepskins that had begun to accumulate. This was apparently the only form of Rhuun dress, but it was immensely practical and versatile. In an ice-age winter it would have also provided the wearer with a sort of mobile home as well as a sleeping bag. Instead of sewing the skins together, she pinned them with barbed and sharpened hawthorn twigs. I made a big show of being pleased with it.
Because Rhuun words were short, simple nouns and verbs, strung together with rudimentary grammar, we were able to communicate adequately after only days. Intonation was important too, but that was far harder to learn. My theory was that Rhuun words, which were generally guttural, had developed to blend in with the snorts, grunts and calls of the animals they hunted. The hunters might have stalked wild sheep under the cover of their pelt cloaks, smelling like sheep themselves and calling to each other with bleat-like words.
On the other hand, the mathematics of the Rhuun calendar was quite advanced for a nomadic, stone-age tribe. The Rhuun might have developed their own, simple language, then come in contact with members of a very advanced society and copied ideas like counting and calendars. Els had no grasp of nations, laws or even machines. To her all machines were animals. She knew nothing of tame animals, either. To her all animals were either prey or predators.
That evening Marella was not at the debriefing meeting. Most of the discussion revolved around the way Els fastened the sheepskins of my cloak together, and how this might have been the birth of clothing. Tormes appro
ached me later, as I sat alone in the clinic’s cafeteria.
“Eating another salad?” he asked.
“Els is more of a carnivore than we humans,” I replied, “but I can’t get by on meat alone.”
“She seems to be taking a shine to you.”
“I like her too. She has a strangely powerful charisma.”
“And pleasantly firm boobs?”
“That too. I appear to be her mate, even without consummation.”
“Would you consider staying with her, say for a trip to Madrid?”
“Madrid?”
“For her unveiling, so to speak. As her companion.”
Appearing on television in a sheepskin cloak was not an appealing prospect,
“There are far better linguists than me,” I pointed out.
“But she really trusts you. You would gain a lot of favour with some very powerful people. Some would even like you to screw her, to research Middle Pleistocene sexual practices.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Look, this is grotesque!” I snapped. “Just who are you? Do you think you can—”
“I am a professor of anthropology, Carlos, and I recognize what Els represents. A genuine archaic hominid, straight out of the Pleistocene.”
I shook my head.
“Apart from Els herself we have no other evidence.”
“We do have other evidence, Carlos; we just don’t understand it. Last year I made a strange find, in what had once been the bed of a shallow lake. It was a collection of stone scrapers, knives and hand-axes.”
“So?”
“So similar sites have been found since then. It’s as if a tribe of heidelbergensians just dropped everything they were carrying and vanished.”
“They probably dropped everything and ran when something frightened them,” I said. “A bear, maybe.”
“Possibly, but that’s not the point. The site I found was seven thousand years old, four times more recent than the last neanderthal and a quarter of a million years later than homo heidelbergensis was around.”
Reality began to waver before my eyes. I was sitting in a table in a clinic, wearing a Middle Pliocene hairstyle, eating a salad, and engaged to a heidelbergensian girl.